[HN Gopher] Note that I wouldn't pass the listed minimum require...
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Note that I wouldn't pass the listed minimum requirements
Author : gone35
Score : 602 points
Date : 2021-06-30 10:47 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| caeril wrote:
| The VAST majority of the comments here are missing John's point
| entirely.
|
| This is about credentialism, not experience. John _definitely_
| meets the listed minimum requirements in terms of experience, but
| he was too busy inventing an entire industry to go get a Master
| 's degree, or any degree, for that matter.
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| Those minimum qualifications are hilarious. I wouldn't be
| surprised if there isn't a single person in the world that can
| meet them.
| skytreader wrote:
| General SE hiring comment: One thing I realized, for most IT/SE
| jobs, the more accurately you describe your current stack in the
| requirements (or maybe the person you are replacing), the smaller
| your candidate pool is. You might even find that your candidate
| pool is exactly the people you are already working with.
|
| Which makes it problematic when we make HR people do the initial
| screening. They would filter out a lot of good candidates just
| because they used Python instead of Java, or had been working on
| a C++ project one year less than the person leaving the team.
|
| Could it be then that this is a communication problem between the
| Engineering team and the HRD? After all, the Eng'g team writes
| the requirements for the job post, HRD just checks it and makes
| it look attractive.
|
| (Though honestly, I don't think this general comment applies to
| the job post in Carmack's tweet. Honestly I can't fault the job
| post for the way it was worded. I say the higher you are in an
| SE-org chain, the less this is a problem.)
| eatonphil wrote:
| I am very explicit with any screeners I use that any of these X
| languages or databases are qualifiers for the job.
|
| I haven't really had any issues finding folks with experience
| outside of our stack when doing this.
| dharmab wrote:
| > You might even find that your candidate pool is exactly the
| people you are already working with.
|
| We once had an open position on a team that was tied to our
| office in a lower-population city in a low-population US state.
| The wording of our listing made it clear that the list of
| technologies was mostly "nice to have" and not strictly
| required.
|
| The first recruiter just punched in all the technologies into
| LinkedIn search and sent a form message to everyone that
| matched and already lived near the office. The result: My
| entire team got emails offering them to interview themselves
| for their own jobs.
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| This is very common. I work as a contractor, and recruiters
| (for permanent and contracting work) very often contact me to
| work in projects I am already in. I mean it makes sense,
| living close by is one of the major bonuses when I decide to
| take a project; the farther away the less likely I'll take it
| - especially since the companies usually have a fixed hourly
| rate in mind, and the farther I live away the less likely I
| would be able to compete with local contractors that can
| offer lower rates - so I don't even waste time to go through
| the application process.
| CodeMage wrote:
| > General SE hiring comment: One thing I realized, for most
| IT/SE jobs, the more accurately you describe your current stack
| in the requirements (or maybe the person you are replacing),
| the smaller your candidate pool is.
|
| Perhaps the solution is to not always aim for the narrowest
| possible fit. There are many people who would like an
| opportunity to learn new things and grow.
|
| I understand that this thinking can't be applied to all
| positions. If, for example, you want to bring in someone new to
| your company and put them in charge of "everything Foo-
| related", then you need someone with suitable experience in
| Foo. However, too many companies tend to extend that too far
| down the ladder.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| I find it insane that HR is interfering with engineering
| hiring.
|
| In all my jobs we ALWAYS sidestepped HR to do any form of
| hiring, even though we used recruiters which had their own ways
| of sourcing candidates (that was mainly useful to get
| candidates of a certain race and gender to fill in diversity
| quotas). The CTO has the budget and agrees benefits with HR.
| After that the job post and ways of sourcing candidates is
| through the engineering team.
|
| Once we do an offer, the ball is back to HR and they finalise
| the contract / bureaucracy.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| This!
|
| I am trying to find front end devs to work on an Electron app,
| using react. Recruiter is ignoring people with Node/ React or
| Vue, angular etc and just replying that there are no
| candidates!
| darksaints wrote:
| I'd like to point out that that is exactly what you want to do
| sometimes. Our HR department absolutely refuses to put out reqs
| with anything more specific than a generic software engineer
| description, because they rely on having a general pool of
| applicants that they can shuffle around to different teams.
|
| While that might work for most software teams, my team has a
| couple of specialties that are not just hard to hire for, but
| also hard to train for, and sometimes take years to learn. If
| we hire someone with general software engineering expertise, we
| typically consider their entire first year to be a training
| year with extremely limited productivity...even if they are a
| well experienced senior level engineer.
|
| So we try to put out more specific requirements: Experience
| with geospatial information systems and standards. Or
| experience with constraint programming or other forms of
| mathematical optimization like LP, MIP, IP, or QP. Or
| experience with spectrum licensing regulation or 3gpp
| standards.
|
| And because they don't put out easily searchable reqs, we never
| get candidates that we wouldn't need to train extensively,
| unless we do their job and seek them out ourselves.
| giantg2 wrote:
| You mention accurate description reducing the candidate pool,
| which I can agree with when it gets long.
|
| Another big issue is the lack of precision in the description.
| When can you claim you _know_ or are an _expert_ in tech X? And
| then do that for 10 out of the 10 listed competencies
| /technologies? Who determines if I'm _highly motivated_? The
| specs they list are simply not realistic and ask for everything
| and the kitchen sink. Candidates have seen through this BS and
| just apply to anything that might possibly fit them. This means
| that companies get a ton of underqualified candidates. If they
| were just real and cut the BS, that could make the whole
| process more efficient. Dont even get me started in "5 years
| experience" in a tech that's only been out for 3 years or less.
|
| Reading job posts is probably something I hate even more
| interviews. At least in interviews you can have a conversation
| and get some questions answered.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > When can you claim you know or are an expert in tech X?
|
| For me? Never. For my agency? As soon as I complete a single
| job well.
| mmmBacon wrote:
| As much as we all love to blame HR it is unfair to put this on
| HR.
|
| The hiring manager writes the job description and comes up with
| the requirements. In many cases these job descriptions are
| written by a senior IC and the hiring manager just massages.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| > Which makes it problematic when we make HR people do the
| initial screening. They would filter out a lot of good
| candidates just because they used Python instead of Java, or
| had been working on a C++ project one year less than the person
| leaving the team.
|
| Part (but not all) of the problem is resume spam. There's a
| small amount of people who apply for every job under the sun,
| even though they aren't qualified.
|
| That, IMO, is what HR resume filtering should be: Making sure
| someone isn't just spamming their resume. Otherwise, the "We
| use FooLang, so your X years of experience with BarLang is
| okay" really is a decision the hiring manager needs to make.
| [Edit] Ideally, HR should know enough to not pass along a
| resume from someone who just completed a 3-month coding
| bootcamp for an architect-level position.
| xroche wrote:
| > Which makes it problematic when we make HR people do the
| initial screening
|
| Here's your mistake. Don't involve HR except to sign paperwork.
| ajross wrote:
| Here's _your_ mistake. Now you have your product engineers
| screening a thousand resumes every week and doing endless
| phone interviews.
|
| Yes, HR is bad at hiring engineers. Nonetheless hiring
| engineers is _a lot of work_ , and engineering departments
| need someone somewhere to take that load.
|
| The solution is hard[1], but at the end of the day needs to
| be something much closer to "better HR" than "don't involve
| HR".
|
| [1] And something very few large companies have cracked.
| Small outfits can usually get by with networking via their
| existing staff, but that doesn't scale well and leads to
| feedback effects like toxic monocultures.
| dkarl wrote:
| > Could it be then that this is a communication problem between
| the Engineering team and the HRD? After all, the Eng'g team
| writes the requirements for the job post, HRD just checks it
| and makes it look attractive.
|
| It depends on the HR department. Some are under pressure to
| "add value" to hiring, so they insist on rewriting job reqs and
| screening all applicants. At a Fortune 50 company I worked at,
| my boss got in trouble because he sweet-talked someone in HR to
| print out all the resumes they rejected and secretly deliver
| them to him. He resorted to this after he informally recruited
| a new hire, wrote a job description specifically targeted at
| them, and then, after waiting two weeks for their application
| to filter through the system, found out that HR round-filed it
| because they supposedly weren't qualified.
|
| HR refused to collaborate with him on editing job descriptions,
| so every time he submitted one, he had to check every day until
| he found out what garbage they posted so he could go beg them
| to fix it. They would randomly add technologies and "change the
| wording" of desired qualifications (how do you "change the
| wording" of proper nouns and jargon from somebody else's
| field?) and they were especially fond of turning nice-to-haves
| into absolute requirements because we supposedly didn't have
| enough. My boss was convinced they were under pressure to
| filter out a target percentage of applicants, because he begged
| them to just pass all the resumes to him, and they refused,
| hence his cloak-and-dagger tactics to get his hands on them.
| htrp wrote:
| >At a Fortune 50 company I worked at, my boss got in trouble
| because he sweet-talked someone in HR to print out all the
| resumes they rejected and secretly deliver them to him.
|
| I did exactly this, though I'm pretty sure I'm not your boss.
|
| As a side note, HR's insistence on doing the initial resume
| review and phone screens usually skews the entire recruitment
| process. I've had situations where HR gave me 20 resumes and
| didn't even look at the rest.
| celticninja wrote:
| Our HR just checks if they completed the application
| correctly, i.e, included a CV and (if requested a covering
| letter). If they fail this bit they don't get to the sift.
| The sift of CVs/resumes (to whittle down for interview) is
| done by developers and so are the interviews.
| jbay808 wrote:
| Our HR was like this too! They were amazing. They sent a
| spreadsheet with each applicant in it, greyed out the
| ones who didn't follow instructions, and bolded the ones
| that they thought I should read first based on how close
| their applications were.
|
| I read all of them, even the greyed out ones, until I'd
| read enough to trust that the HR team's filter was well-
| calibrated, and I also let the HR team know when they got
| it right/wrong so they could improve their filtering
| process.
|
| Overall it worked great but I understand that such
| functional HR teams are the exception, not the rule.
| aj3 wrote:
| This sounds like an amazing hiring process. Hopefully it
| becomes more common.
| fridif wrote:
| A CV should not be necessary
|
| Edit: My apologies everyone. I actually read this as
| "cover letter" instead of CV.
|
| I agree a resume (as noted below) should be required, but
| CV (academic style) is probably a US term not applicable
| here.
|
| Sorry!
| celticninja wrote:
| How else can i whittle down 30 applicants to 5 or 6 to
| invite to interview?
|
| edit: saw another response which said a cv was a resume,
| this is correct. In the UK we use Curriculum Vitae (CV)
| instead of resume. They are the same thing. Not sure what
| you may have thought a CV was, however I would be
| interested to know.
| muffinman26 wrote:
| In the US a CV is a comprehensive list of all previous
| work in the field, while a resume includes only the most
| recent/relevant experience. The term is primarily used
| for academic positions, where it includes a listing of
| all publications.
| ajford wrote:
| They could be meaning a resume as used in the US. Outside
| of the US (or at least in a number of European countries)
| what is called a resume in the US is referred to as a CV
| (though my understanding is that it's generally a few
| pages long, not a single page). Though this comes not
| from first-hand experience, but a lot of in-depth
| conversations with friends/coworkers from overseas, so I
| might be wrong here.
| faster wrote:
| That just happened to me! I have been a contractor at a
| Fortune 50 company for a while and they opened a position for
| the job I'm doing. I applied and was rejected by the HR
| algorithm (the rejection email came about 2 minutes after I
| submitted my application so I seriously doubt that any humans
| were involved). The job site I had to apply through was
| taleo.net.
|
| Centralized HR is for managing benefits and setting policies.
| They never help with the hiring process, in my experience.
| nitrogen wrote:
| I had a similar experience years ago. I was bootstrapping a
| startup and using consulting to pay the bills in lean
| months. Eventually I decided that I wasn't going to reach
| my market without massive investment to keep up with the PR
| of the 800lb gorillas, and I didn't want to go that route.
|
| One of the engineering managers I had been working with as
| a consultant had tried to recruit me more than once, so I
| decided to accept. But shortly after a mandatory HR
| screening call, I got an apologetic rejection email from
| the engineering manager.
| bombcar wrote:
| The correct thing to do there is to continue to consult
| and charge them $HR_IS_DUMB.
| nitrogen wrote:
| I did, of course :). But eventually the product revision
| I was consulting on was discontinued, I didn't feel like
| being a salesperson _and_ a dev anymore, and I slowly
| found my way back into the traditional job market.
| yardie wrote:
| This also happened to me. Was seeking promotion for the job I
| was already doing. But university rules required the job be
| posted for 30 days. So I wrote the job description and
| requirements sent it to HR. And submitted my CV, which the
| job description was based on, into their portal. And was
| roundly rejected, automatically. My manager spoke with HR to
| ask what the hell was going on. And found out some
| politicking was involved and my CV was dumped for a better
| connected candidate.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| This is one of the hardest things for me to grapple with in
| my career. I hate that there is realistically a hard
| ceiling to how successful I can be because I don't have
| strong network effects working for me.
|
| I'm from a pretty small town, low income family. Edit/ I
| also did my Computer Science degree at a small university
| that was a community college when I started my degree.
| /Edit. Making my way in the world often feels like being a
| small fish in a vast ocean. People from wealthier families,
| or who have built-in connections from growing up in the big
| cities or going to prestigious universities don't really
| understand what an advantage their networks are.
| zubiaur wrote:
| It takes time. Some people have a jumpstart, it is true,
| but there are ways for us who didn't, to build a network
| of trust.
|
| Be good at what you do, genuinely help people, without
| expecting or calculating whether it'll be beneficial to
| you, stay close with those who help you, and who you
| helped.
|
| Eventually, you'll find your way into a good cluster.
| Some start in the middle of it, we started in the
| periphery. Accrue good faith and trust and it will only
| keep growing. It's non linear. Something something
| preferential attachment.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Don't get me wrong, I do quite well compared to a lot of
| people. I'm not unhappy with my career. I am just not
| great at networking.
|
| I have also had bad luck with jobs so far. Everywhere I
| go, people above me seem more inclined to try and keep me
| where I am than help me improve and grow. I always have
| very good relationships with my teammates though, so I
| know I'm doing something right.
| zubiaur wrote:
| I feel ya, people are hard, and bosses really influence
| how we experiences work. Advocating for oneself IS hard,
| more so when we are relatively comfortable.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Job-hop friend. Job-hop.
|
| I was in a similar situation to you and through work I've
| developed a pretty good network of former colleagues.
| After about 10 years, it my network ended up stretching
| so far that I had contacts at basically every major
| company my city.
|
| I mean, very few of my former colleagues ended up in the
| upper echelons of businesses, but almost all of them are
| in senior IC roles for which a recommendation carries a
| lot of weight, especially for an opening on their own
| team.
| wins32767 wrote:
| I have some similarities in background as you and I
| _hated_ networking but I've been very happy with my
| career trajectory. You need to make sure you filter out
| highly political jobs during your job searches, do the
| best work you can, and maintain touch with the good
| people you've worked with. For the latter I email/text
| folks I want to work with again every quarter (using a
| calendar reminder to prompt me) just to keep the
| connection warm. For the first one, asking questions like
| "How do key decisions get made at this company?" or "Can
| you tell me about the last project that didn't go as
| planned, what happened afterwards?" will give you
| reasonably strong signal.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > You need to make sure you filter out highly political
| jobs during your job searches
|
| I think this has been a big source of my grief so far. I
| keep winding up in heavily political companies.
|
| Thank you for the advice. Networking is definitely
| something I intend to take more seriously. It's become
| much more clear to me how important it is as my career
| progresses.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Almost all companies are heavily political. It's
| inevitable given human nature in hierarchies.
| User23 wrote:
| Understanding social hierarchy is a skill that can be
| learned and you can raise your position in that hierarchy
| using that skill.
|
| When people say "I'm not political" they're really just
| confessing to low social status and acumen. I personally
| wish things were different, but as you note they're not.
| So one may as well accept reality and play the game as
| best as one can. One can have a very successful career as
| a follower if one recognizes the traits of good leaders
| and the traits that good leaders are looking for.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > When people say "I'm not political" they're really just
| confessing to low social status and acumen.
|
| Right. Politics is a tool often used to keep people with
| low social status where they are.
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| Maybe. They could be fearing being disliked, estranged,
| or an argument for having the "wrong" beliefs. (Politics,
| religion, computer languages.)
|
| Much like gossip, politics is pack violence and order by
| other means, and is usable by people who have less
| physical power but more social influence. If you don't
| have either physical and social power, then you're
| dismissed as not a threat and ripe to be stepped-on.
| Gossip is often a political attack technique to take-down
| a physically-strong leader.
| wins32767 wrote:
| I would agree that almost all companies are political to
| some degree, but I wouldn't agree with heavily political.
| It's a sign of poor leadership if they end up in that
| state because you can minimize the impact of different
| goals and incentives, be they personal, professional, or
| organizational which is what drives basically all of
| politics.
| dugmartin wrote:
| This happened a lot at the university I went to. Most jobs
| were civil service and applicants got extra points for
| veteran status, disability status, etc such that they were
| always the first in line for a position. To counteract this
| hiring managers would construct job requirements such as X
| years of experience in a combination of Y homegrown or
| highly customized applications and workflows so that
| basically only one person in the world (the person they
| wanted to hire) was qualified to fill the position. I'm not
| sure this was illegal but it seemed very unethical.
| vimy wrote:
| Did you get the promotion?
| yardie wrote:
| Yes. My manager had to intervene. She's the one that told
| me why I wasn't being forwarded after asking HR.
| coredog64 wrote:
| HR at a previous employer would write the job descriptions in
| partnership with the hiring manager. Unfortunately, the
| descriptions had to apply to everyone in the position because
| they were also used for compensation research.
|
| It took one manager months to get "Windows NT" removed from
| the description for a network position.
| bombcar wrote:
| But why would you remove "Windows Network Technology" from
| a network position? Hehehehehe.
| dkarl wrote:
| It's a joke and you're getting downvoted, but that is
| exactly the kind of reasoning the HR team I was
| describing would use. Lots of "common sense" like that,
| but they would use their own "knowledge" to do things
| like replace "OOP" with "Java." Harmless stuff if they
| had been working collaboratively (preferably in real
| time) with hiring managers who could double-check their
| work, but they were unwilling to do that. They wouldn't
| even let hiring managers view a req before they published
| it. And if you suggested that they not change technical
| terminology and not promote nice to haves to must haves,
| they acted like you were attacking their professional
| ability and their right to earn a living.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > Some are under pressure to "add value" to hiring, so they
| insist on rewriting job reqs and screening all applicants.
|
| That means it's too big and time to cut full time employees
| and hire contractors.
|
| If HR are in charge of hiring for technical positions, the
| company has deep issues...
| bambataa wrote:
| Stories like remind me so much of bizarre inefficiencies
| caused by targets etc in the Soviet Union. Thank goodness
| capitalism is efficient, right? /s
| gurchik wrote:
| I worked at a company where the DevOps team was having a hard
| time retaining employees. New engineers were staying on
| average for less than 1 year, and that was when we'd actually
| get candidates, oftentimes going months without a single
| person applying. This was a large employer in a small town
| that paid extremely well and had the best benefits I've ever
| had so I couldn't understand it. That's when I went on the
| website and read the job posting. Minimum requirements were
| several years of experience each in Java, Python, and
| JavaScript. The team didn't write code in those languages,
| why were they mandatory requirements? The people that did
| have those skills were unhappy once they realized they
| weren't going to be doing any coding on this team. It made
| more sense to me to only list things like Ansible or
| Terraform or Docker, things the team used on a daily basis,
| and be up front with candidates about the job
| responsibilities.
|
| On the same team there were a couple people who came from
| non-coding backgrounds like Unix systems administration and
| production support, they loved the job and had been at the
| company for many years. Why weren't we looking for more of
| those people? My boss told me that HR was judged by the
| qualifications of the candidates they allow to proceed in the
| process. No one would ask questions if you raised the hiring
| bar, or you might even get kudos. This made no sense to me as
| that would be like an engineer who only did work one day per
| month, not taking any chances on touching systems or code
| that had any chance of introducing a bug.
|
| This was my first job out of school and it taught me that in
| these large Fortune 100 companies, through no malice at all,
| silos can create policies that make complete sense to them
| that don't actually accomplish anything.
| jauer wrote:
| FB job reqs are drafted in collaboration with engineering,
| not imposed by HR (but really they are often copy-pasted and
| slightly modified from existing).
|
| If you look at FB job reqs in prod network engineering
| (network in title, infrastructure is area of work), the
| qualifications should be reasonable. This covers most roles
| that are not pure SWE or rack and stack (SWE and "deployment
| and support" cover those roles).
|
| ~3-4 years ago a director shared a req and asked that we pass
| it on to our friends / anyone that might be interested. Some
| of us asked why specific items were in the req since they
| didn't reflect the team or our work. We also noted how it
| reinforced bias (women tend not to apply if they do not meet
| _all_ quals. men tend to apply if they meet _any_ quals).
|
| Response was "good point, we'll remove them" and our reqs got
| a lot shorter and less exclusionary.
|
| You might note that we tend to not have any education
| requirements. At one point the req listed university degrees.
| This was funny because we had a bimodal distribution of uni
| drop-out (maybe no high school diploma) on one side and MS or
| Ph.D on the other.
|
| e.g. zero education requirements section in job reqs for my
| team:
| https://www.facebook.com/careers/v2/jobs/468265564478223/
|
| https://www.facebook.com/careers/v2/jobs/190442889615860/
| taffronaut wrote:
| The missing step can be that in a large company HR needs to
| assign a grade/job type to the role before they advertise it
| and these are standardised typically with respect to both
| education qualification and years of experience. The
| combination of the hiring managers spec and the HR grade/type
| definition is what gets posted. This is usually the cause of a
| job asking for pointless qualifications or more years of
| experience than a given technology has existed.
| Aeolun wrote:
| In my experience, the HRD makes it look like crap. Seriously, I
| don't know how they can mangle such a nicely formatted document
| so badly.
| dylan604 wrote:
| That's a skill set requirement on the HR position's miminum
| standards.
| mywittyname wrote:
| I work super closely with recruitment and HR to ensure this
| doesn't happen. If they are unsure of a candidate, they just
| send a quick note on slack asking for a thumbs up/down on them.
| Honestly, after a year or so of experience, they kind of learn
| what technologies are analogs to the ones we use.
|
| We recently had a person who did COBOL apply, which through
| recruiting for a loop.
|
| I do get frustrated with the way our engineering manager write
| job descriptions. Especially since they can be wishy-washy on
| what they actually want (early on, candidate is good, but later
| on, mgmt wants more experience). It's been even worse recently
| as they've been just throwing out seemingly random job titles
| in order to just get candidates to bite. So I go for an
| interview and see they are applying for a job title like "data
| science engineer," and when I ask the manager wtf that is, they
| say, oh, that's your position (def NOT data science), but that
| job title gets more applicants.
|
| I used to think HR was the problem, but the more I make
| sausage, the more I realize that engineering managers are a big
| part of the problem.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > Which makes it problematic when we make HR people do the
| initial screening. They would filter out a lot of good
| candidates just because they used Python instead of Java, or
| had been working on a C++ project one year less than the person
| leaving the team.
|
| Companies paying top dollar for the best engineering talent
| aren't having inexperienced HR drones or automated software
| filter resumes. They have dedicated recruiters who have a
| proven track record of being able to properly interpret resumes
| and work with candidates to accurately understand their
| backgrounds. They're also very good at working with engineering
| hiring managers to understand the actual requirements of the
| job.
|
| That's more or less what John Carmack is trying to say here:
| The requirements aren't being used internally as a strict
| pass/fail criteria before anyone is considered for the
| position.
|
| I've only worked for one company that had inexperienced HR
| people screen resumes. It was standard practice among
| engineering hiring managers at that company to use external
| recruiters for this reason.
|
| Hiring managers aren't dumb. Companies paying high six figures
| or more for engineers aren't dumb. We don't want to miss out on
| good candidates. I personally read every single resume that
| comes through applications to my job postings, and I know I'm
| not alone. Hiring is hard, and it's not worth letting someone
| else screw it up just to save a little bit of time.
|
| On the other hand, if you're applying to a local dinosaur of a
| tech company that pays below-average compensation and takes 3
| months to respond to candidates, all bets are off. You could
| indeed be up against automated hiring software and people who
| don't know how to read resumes. But you also don't want to work
| there if you can avoid it.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Companies paying top dollar for the best engineering talent
| aren't having inexperienced HR drones or automated software
| filter resumes. They have dedicated recruiters who have a
| proven track record of being able to properly interpret
| resumes and work with candidates to accurately understand
| their backgrounds.
|
| Like using Leetcode popular at these top places you
| mentioned.
| qez wrote:
| > The requirements aren't being used internally as a strict
| pass/fail criteria before anyone is considered for the
| position.
|
| Then they are mislabeled as "minimum requirements." They must
| be relabeled as "preferred requirements."
| srvmshr wrote:
| >You could indeed be up against automated hiring software and
| people who don't know how to read resumes.
|
| I was interviewed by MedTronics in 2015 by a HR fellow who
| asked me if I used 'C++11'. He had trouble believing that the
| 'C++11' was a language standard (adding features to the
| language) & not a language by itself.
| dtech wrote:
| Why did you feel the need to be pedantic about that? It's
| not a strange question to ask if someone has experience in
| Blub 7 or its popular framework Blubbimate.
| ctvo wrote:
| > That's more or less what John Carmack is trying to say
| here: The requirements aren't being used internally as a
| strict pass/fail criteria before anyone is considered for the
| position.
|
| Then remove them? It says "Minimum Requirements". It's
| already proven that women, minorities and others on the
| outside don't apply when they don't meet these
| qualifications. You thinking that recruiters know what
| they're doing at these companies, then we can only conclude
| they're doing it on purpose.
| xenocratus wrote:
| Just wanted to throw one reference out there:
|
| https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/117/48/30303.full.pdf
|
| I found it interesting to read, having gone down a small
| rabbit-hole after your comment :)
| thouitsme wrote:
| Interesting indeed, thanks for sharing!
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| Extrapolating on this further, if it's _proven_ that
| certain demographics won't apply given this "mechanism", a
| company could likely open themselves up to a very tenable
| lawsuit if they post a position with requirements they
| don't really follow. It would be quite easy to make the
| argument the company is doing so to filter in white males.
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| Incredibly cynical.
|
| What if we helped minorities, women, and others on the
| outside meet the qualifications instead of lowering the
| standards? And yes that also includes rewriting some of the
| qualifications to be more realistic, I am not discounting
| that.
|
| This comment is coming off as incendiary, judging by the
| quick clapback style of response to simply the first
| clause. I want to emphasis I also believe requirements
| should be rewritten to be more realistic and pertinent to
| the job. The solution in my view is to cater to the people
| who do take job requirements seriously (which to my
| understanding is the reason why women for example are
| excluded more) rather than just throw your hands up and say
| "job requirements are a joke"
| whymauri wrote:
| >instead of lowering the standards?
|
| If John Carmack doesn't meet the standards, then you
| probably shouldn't worry about 'lowering them.' As if
| making tech more accessible requires lowering any
| standards, anyways.
| [deleted]
| addingnumbers wrote:
| If John Carmack doesn't meet the standards, then you
| probably SHOULD think about 'lowering them.'
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| Please read the entirety of my comment before teeing off
| on just the first clause.
| addingnumbers wrote:
| The second sentence was even more ambiguous than the
| first one
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| You're saying the same thing. "shouldn't worry about" -
| "don't think there is a problem with".
| addingnumbers wrote:
| should worry about -> do think there is a problem with
|
| shouldn't worry about -> don't think there is a problem
| with
|
| How are those the same?
| Macha wrote:
| I think these can actually mean the same thing here, it
| depends if the thing you're passing judgement on is
| interpreted to be the requirements, or the act of
| lowering the requirements.
|
| You should worry about the requirements because they're
| bad and need fixing.
|
| You shouldn't worry about the consequences of lowering
| the requirements because you weren't enforcing them
| anyway.
| [deleted]
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| No one said "should worry about" they said "should think
| about".
|
| "shouldn't worry about about 'lowering them.'" -> don't
| think there is a problem with lowering them.
|
| "probably SHOULD think about 'lowering them.'" -> should
| think about lowering them.
| addingnumbers wrote:
| "If the smoke alarm goes off, you shouldn't worry about
| evacuating the building."
|
| Is this an acceptable way to convey that you should
| evacuate the building without worrying?
| Macha wrote:
| Yeah, if you don't think there is a problem with lowering
| the requirements, that means you think it's ok to lower
| the requirements.
|
| Because you're not losing out on imaginary "significantly
| more qualified than John Carmack" applicants.
| Macha wrote:
| The issue is that people in the industry have been
| trained to know that minimum requirements are bullshit
| and apply anyway. So if women and minorites are
| underrepresented behind the gate, and see the gate as far
| more impenetrable than the groups which have already made
| it in, then setting these requirements aspirationally is
| keeping them out.
|
| John Carmack is arguably one of the most qualified people
| in the industry for this role, and he doesn't meet the
| requirements.
|
| So it's not the case that there's piles of white men who
| _do_ meet the requirements that get it instead, and we
| just need to help minorities get to that level, it's that
| there's piles of white men that recognise the
| requirements are nonsense, so apply and get it without
| meeting them. Setting the requirements to what the
| recruiters actually require isn't lowering the bar as a
| result.
| throwaway316943 wrote:
| It seems like it would be an much easier task to simply
| broadcast this knowledge to women and minorities than it
| would be to change the practices of every HR department,
| no?
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| In my experiences of mentoring underrepresented groups in
| the industry, it's a matter of morality. Many see it as
| straight up dishonest to do so. It's not just some secret
| hack they can just employ; you're asking them to cast
| their morals aside and do something they believe is
| wrong.
|
| I actually think this _worse_, let alone _much harder_
| than simply telling HR to chill with that shit.
| coliveira wrote:
| So there are two options: tell all minorities to do
| something they don't know about, or tell people on the
| top to write realistic requirements. And you think that
| the right thing to do is to go around and teach this to
| every minority group. This tells a lot about your
| position of privilege.
| ahtihn wrote:
| Is it somehow secret knowledge reserved to "privileged"
| people that minimum requirements on job ads should be
| interpreted as a wish list more than a list of hard
| requirements?
|
| It's commonly talked about in a lot of places online,
| including here.
|
| It's also something you very quickly learn when searching
| for your 1st job. If you take minimum requirements at
| face value, there's almost no jobs anyone straight out of
| school would qualify for.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Is it somehow secret knowledge reserved to "privileged"
| people that minimum requirements on job ads should be
| interpreted as a wish list more than a list of hard
| requirements?
|
| It is definitely cultural knowledge that not all people
| have, and, more to the point, an understanding of what
| _parts_ of a particular job ad that are stated as MQs are
| likely to be nice-to-haves and which are real MQs and
| which are nice to haves behind which are hiding real MQs
| (such as "Ph.D. in <field>" really meaning something
| like "a Ph.D. would be nice but a Masters is a hard
| minimum"), and therefore, how to evaluate whether it is
| worth expending effort applying for a job is non-
| universal cultural knowledge.
|
| This often requires understanding of the hiring cultures
| of the particular job-field, industry, employer, and
| sometimes organizational subunit. Which is, for people
| just starting out (or looking outside of their past
| experience), highly network dependent. And equally
| substantively qualified people from underrepresented
| demographics arr likely to have weaker, in terms relevant
| to the task at hand, networks and therefore less access
| to this cultural knowledge.
|
| > It's also something you very quickly learn when
| searching for your 1st job.
|
| Or not, in part because there are lots of places where
| its not true and if you act like it is you will learn
| hard.
|
| Lying about requirements in hiring may be common, but it
| is not a universal norm, and calling it out and
| denormalizing it is a good thing, even outside of
| discriminatory impact, but its also very much a practice
| that has particular adverse impact on underrepresented
| minorities.
| coliveira wrote:
| When HR creates fake requirements the goal is exactly to
| be able to weed out anyone they don't like. If someone is
| not from the "right" group they'll just let them know
| that they don't meet the "minimum requirements".
| kapp_in_life wrote:
| That's a separate issue. The first issue is that those
| groups don't apply _at all_.
| throwaway316943 wrote:
| That's a different thesis from what we're discussing. To
| clarify, we're assuming the interviews are fair and the
| min requirements are being munged by an HR department
| that doesn't understand the list that engineering has
| given them and potential applicants are not even applying
| based on these garbled job postings. If you think that HR
| departments are biased and are making up fake
| requirements, that very well could be the case in some
| situations, but it's not what we're talking about here.
| Macha wrote:
| Sure, and I've personally been in charity events for
| economically disadvantaged groups where that's been one
| of the more important pieces of advice we gave, so such
| approaches are ongoing, but still the studies indicate
| the message hasn't gotten through with current levels -
| so you'd need to either significantly scale up such
| efforts to reach more people at a personal enough level
| to convince them, or try another approach.
| lostcolony wrote:
| If that even works. Do white guys who apply say to
| themselves "those requirements are BS", and minorities
| say "I don't meet those requirements so I shouldn't
| apply"? Or is it white guys are more likely to not read
| them as closely? Or white guys are more likely to feel
| "I'm good enough to do it regardless of what it asks
| for"? Or something else? Because just telling minorities
| "the requirements are more suggestions than requirements"
| isn't going to help if it's any of those.
| burnished wrote:
| None of the above?
|
| You know how peoples used to have folklores and stories
| that got passed down? Well, we still do, but the
| culturally transmitted information is now stuff like "Oh,
| yeah, those requirement lists are bullshit".
| aj3 wrote:
| Of course not. There are even certain minorities which
| are known to extremely exagerrate their abilities and
| accomplishments (even when they wouldn't last a day on
| actual job).
|
| I really think it's as simple as having friends/peers in
| the know-how or not. Some people have family members,
| classmates, maybe even majority of their social circle
| working in IT which obviously exposes them to inner
| workings including this issue with job requirements. And
| then there are people whose social circle is far from IT
| so they just don't have confidence to (pretty much) lie
| on resume.
| mook wrote:
| Additionally, as mentioned elsewhere in the thread, fake
| requirements can be used as a reason to arbitrarily
| reject otherwise good candidates (for example to provide
| cover for rejection over being a minority). So it's not
| unreasonable to suspect that minorities have learned to
| ignore those listings as they just waste time.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| It's not about lowering the standard it's about clearly
| communicating them.
|
| Why do we need this doublespeak and a wink and a nod for
| these roles?
| matt-attack wrote:
| And why are women and minorities unaware of the wink and
| a nod? What else are they not aware of?
|
| Are they not able to reason through the fact that the
| requirements must logically be not realistic? Are women
| known to not question authority to the same degree as
| men? Why not endeavor to fix that about women.
| watwut wrote:
| It is about who assumes rules will be bend for them. If
| you apply for role where you dont fit requirements, it
| can be interpreted as ambitions or arrogant or stupid.
| evandale wrote:
| I don't understand why being seen as arrogant or stupid
| by a faceless HR robot in a company you don't work for
| should matter to a person. It feels like a confidence
| issue that somebody should look into resolving so that
| they can live a more fulfilling life.
| matt-attack wrote:
| ...or well-read.
| mbbutler wrote:
| You're not lowering anything because the listed minimums
| aren't what is actually required.
|
| All you're doing is filtering for people who are willing
| to bullshit their way into a job.
| ctvo wrote:
| Hello. Rewriting the requirements to be more realistic is
| lowering the "standard".
|
| No one, anywhere has said we shouldn't be doing more.
| This conversation is around gatekeeping by listing
| unrealistic minimum requirements.
| asveikau wrote:
| It strikes me that there is some kind of market effect to
| embellishing the requirements. If a company is honest about
| requirements in an environment where everybody else
| exaggerates, applicants who don't meet your more honest but
| lower requirements will think they're embellished, because
| everybody does that, and apply.
| josefx wrote:
| Maybe they are using it as argument for wage
| negotiations. Kind of "you are clearly under qualified
| but we can still make use of your meager skills if you
| work twice as long for half the money". Don't quite
| remember if Facebook was part of that wage dumping
| agreement Google and Apple participated in.
| asveikau wrote:
| I guess I've heard of another type of gaming of
| requirements: the H1B thing. The story here goes that
| they need to demonstrate they looked for someone with the
| same skills as somebody hired under an H1B. So they post
| job listings that are extremely specific to the person
| they hired, that no one can match.
|
| No idea if that's true. I heard it claimed by many. I
| guess it sounds kinda implausible for a large company,
| they would need to create possibly thousands of fake job
| listings.
| rdiddly wrote:
| I'm not in those groups but I also don't apply, because
| applying to jobs sucks ass, and I want to minimize the
| number of times I do it. So I make a judgment call every
| time - "How likely is it that this will be a waste of my
| time?" I screen them harder than they screen me. If I don't
| meet the stated requirements I don't waste time on it. I
| don't allow for the "real" requirements being different
| from what's stated, because I'm not going to waste time on
| guesswork, deciphering, or dealing with incompetence, lies
| or mere bullshit. Move on, move on. Responding to postings
| is a low-yield activity anyway. Jobs come from knowing
| people.
| Zababa wrote:
| > It's already proven that women, minorities and others on
| the outside don't apply when they don't meet these
| qualifications.
|
| On the other hand, taking jobs that are a bit outside your
| comfort zone is how you grow. I agree that more realistic
| requirements would helps (especially if they're called
| "minimum"), but you also have to teach to people how to be
| ambitious.
| lostcolony wrote:
| Call me when you need some surgery done! I've never been
| to med school or anything, but I both am really good with
| a knife in the kitchen, AND I've got an excellent track
| record following instructions on DIY Youtube videos.
| burnished wrote:
| If a trained surgeon is out of the question and my
| options are a daylight-fearing nephew and you, well, I'd
| pick you!
| lostcolony wrote:
| If you know those are your only options why are you
| putting out a job description asking for something that
| doesn't exist?
|
| If you didn't know ahead what your options were, and you
| were willing to accept someone who isn't an actual
| surgeon, maybe you would have preferred the person who
| whittles, has a biology degree, also is great with DIY
| videos, was a combat medic, AND isn't squeamish at the
| sight of blood, unlike me? Because she was turned off by
| the fact she didn't meet your listed minimum
| requirements; all you got applying are me and your
| nephew.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| A "job outside my comfort zone" and "lying that I meet
| the minimum requirements" are entirely different things
| and it's a shame the business world tries to conflate the
| two.
| mannykannot wrote:
| Telling people they have already failed is hardly likely
| to teach them to be ambitious.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Applying for a job that I don't meet the minimum
| requirements for feels like somewhere between "fraud" and
| "stupidity". They're literally called "minimum
| requirements".
| pyrale wrote:
| On the other hand, it looks much better to call it
| "minimum requirements" than "fake reasons to refuse
| people we don't like".
| coliveira wrote:
| Exactly. When they create fake requirements the goal is
| exactly to weed out anyone they don't like. Because if
| they find someone of the "right" group they'll give the
| job anyway even if the requirements aren't met.
| pessimizer wrote:
| That's why I keep applying for jobs as a structural
| engineer; eventually somebody will just assume I'm
| credentialed. I'll just figure it out on the job.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| The good news is that the credentials to be a structural
| engineer (PE) are substantially more concrete than those
| to be a software "engineer".
| _ah wrote:
| :) I see what you did there.
| HelloNurse wrote:
| Except that women and minorities tend to be easily
| discouraged, not "ambitious" and confident. Expecting
| candidates to push the boundaries of their qualifications
| is a bias in itself.
| nitrogen wrote:
| _Except that women and minorities tend to be easily
| discouraged, not "ambitious" and confident._
|
| As someone from a rural background where the best case
| was usually HVAC repair and the not-too-uncommon case was
| addiction and stagnation, and who came into tech from far
| outside the normal path, _this_ is the problem to fix,
| and tech company job requirements are _way_ too late in
| the pipeline to exert much leverage there. This needs to
| be solved culturally, across years and generations.
| Thiez wrote:
| > This needs to be solved culturally, across years and
| generations.
|
| That would be great, but if we can substantially reduce
| the impact of the difference in confidence by being
| honest about minimal job requirements _right now_ ,
| shouldn't we also do that?
| devmunchies wrote:
| > Except that women and minorities tend to be easily
| discouraged
|
| This reverse-sexism/racism reads as if you believe on an
| ideological level that women and minorities have inferior
| character defects and need special accommodations.
| goodpoint wrote:
| No. People grow by being in positions that gives them the
| ability to learn.
|
| > you also have to teach to people how to be ambitious
|
| This is a jobspec, not a carrer coaching session.
|
| Filtering out people who feel self-conscious or
| experience impostor syndrome ends up disproportionally
| hurting minorities.
| pyrale wrote:
| > jobs that are a bit outside your comfort zone
|
| There is usually little correlation between the job
| requirements and what you're actually going to do on the
| job.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| > _you also have to teach to people how to be ambitious._
|
| You need to train people to leave their ethics at the
| door and lie until they make it?
|
| They say these are "minimum requirements". You called
| them "qualifications". They're not suggested capabilities
| that you should have to feel comfortable in the job. They
| have a separate section for "Preferred Qualifications",
| so these aren't just preferences, they're requirements if
| you're not willing to break the rules.
|
| A certain subset of the population is willing to check
| the box that says "I meet these requirements" and then
| later push around the interviewer and say they don't
| actually meet them but that they ought to be considered
| anyways. This brash, often narcissistic, overconfident
| group is over-represented in management circles not
| because they're "more ambitious" than others but because
| they're willing to sacrifice their morals to cheat the
| system.
| rpmisms wrote:
| >A certain subset of the population is willing to check
| the box that says "I meet these requirements" and then
| later push around the interviewer and say they don't
| actually meet them but that they ought to be considered
| anyways.
|
| Yeah, I'm honest in interviews. Getting past Automated
| Resume Sorting Equations (ARSE) is tough. As soon as I
| talk to a real human, I'm honest and explain what I know
| and don't know.
| pc86 wrote:
| If you equate "be ambitious" with lying, that says more
| about you than it says about resumes or HR.
| jsight wrote:
| You are correct, of course, but the context of this
| thread is applying to a job without meeting the minimum
| "requirements". Arguably the lie is the "requirements".
|
| But what is a candidate to do? Skip the job, because they
| don't have the required qualifications? Assume the
| requirements aren't real? Dress up the resume with some
| fake barely there qualifications to fit?
|
| Different cultural backgrounds will have different
| responses, and very few will really be lying.
|
| The worst thing, though? The knee-jerk response to the
| ones that dress up the resume is often to want to add
| even more requirements...
| ben_w wrote:
| I'd agree with @LeifCarrotson on this. If an app says
| "minimum requirements: 8 GB RAM" any PC which reports
| that it meets the minimum requirements but actually has 4
| GB RAM is making a false claim.
|
| Ambition is what you can become, not what you are.
|
| The only way of applying without dishonesty would be to
| do so _while openly saying_ "I don't tick all your boxes,
| but I still think I'd be a good fit because XYZ". I might
| like this if I saw it in a job application, because it
| means the applicant was paying attention and not just
| applying to everything... but that doesn't work so well
| when there's already a "Preferred Qualifications"
| section, and might even have the opposite effect.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _If an app says "minimum requirements: 8 GB RAM" any PC
| which reports that it meets the minimum requirements but
| actually has 4 GB RAM is making a false claim_
|
| If a job says you need 8 years of experience and you say
| you have 8 when you have 4, that is lying. If you apply
| to a job that says you need 8 years of experience and you
| only have 4, that isn't lying. It isn't dishonest. It
| would be like the person selling that PC asking, "hey,
| might 4GB work if we throw in a better processor?"
| majormajor wrote:
| Whether or not it's "moral" to apply to the job, this
| whole argument shows the problem with listing minimum
| requirements like that: in this very thread, you've got
| people saying "I'm not going to bother," so you've shrunk
| your candidate pool.
|
| Is "doesn't want to waste our time when we tell them not
| to waste our time" really an important attribute for you
| to reject candidates on? Or would more accurate "minimum"
| requirements be better?
| tomp wrote:
| If the app works with 8GB, the app's requirements are
| stupid and should be ignored.
| bryondowd wrote:
| Applying for a job isn't claiming that you meet the
| requirements, it's testing whether you meet the
| requirements. So the closer analogy would be installing
| an app that claims to require 8 GB RAM, just to see if
| it'll run anyway on your PC with only 4 GB RAM. Maybe the
| installer will block you, or maybe not, as long as you
| aren't tweaking your PC to report to the installer that
| it has more RAM when queried.
| Zababa wrote:
| > "I don't tick all your boxes, but I still think I'd be
| a good fit because XYZ"
|
| That's exactly what I meant by being ambitious. I think
| you shouldn't lie when applying for a job, but on the
| other hand there is a shortage of applicants in tech. You
| could recognize this as an opportunity if you're
| confident that you can "grow to the desired level" of the
| job offer.
| devtul wrote:
| I would still apply for it if I had most of the
| requirement but not all. They are not dumb and would see
| that on my resume and on a cover letter I would write
| explaining how I'm really eager to join them and that I
| would dedicate my time to catching up with whatever tech
| I'm lacking.
|
| It's crazy to assume people would be stuffing their
| resumes instead of they making it clear the position is
| exciting to them and they would work hard to get up to
| standards.
| [deleted]
| Zababa wrote:
| I don't know precisely how that job platform works
| specifically, but in general, I don't see anything wrong
| with it as long as you're honest. In the comment chain I
| was replying too, people are saying that John Carmack is
| saying that you should not take the requirements as a
| strict pass/fail: "That's more or less what John Carmack
| is trying to say here: The requirements aren't being used
| internally as a strict pass/fail criteria before anyone
| is considered for the position.". The comment I replied
| to proposed to removed them completly because they cause
| discrimination based on confidence. I added that even if
| you remove discimination in the applying process, the
| same exact problem will manifest itself everywhere on the
| job, which is why removing the requirements is not a
| complete solution to discimination.
|
| Is your conclusion still that I'm suggesting to "train
| people to leave their ethics at the door and lie until
| they make it?"? Are there any points that I can clarify
| for you? Do you have any suggestions to protect the
| systems from people that exploit it by sacrificing their
| morals?
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| My conclusions remains that a nuanced flexibility between
| honesty and fraud is advantageous for competitive job
| seekers.
|
| I'm aware that the world isn't black and white, someone
| who submits a truthful resume to a job posting where they
| don't technically meet the qualifications has only made a
| little white lie that's almost universally forgiven,
| you're correct that they'll likely look ambitious and
| confident if they tell the interviewer "if you want to be
| super technical about it I don't meet this one little
| qualification but I think you should ignore that because
| factors X and Y make me a great candidate".
|
| It's this culture of pervasive little white lies which is
| harmful. Be brutally correct, not just sufficiently
| honest to brush off these occasional inconsistencies.
| When someone does make a little white lie, call them on
| the lie and take the mandated action. Otherwise people
| who are most flexible with what's acceptable will advance
| more than those who require correctness.
| phaemon wrote:
| > someone who submits a truthful resume to a job posting
| where they don't technically meet the qualifications has
| only made a little white lie
|
| They haven't lied at all. Where is the lie in saying, "I
| don't meet your requirements but I think you should hire
| me anyway"?
| twodave wrote:
| I don't think it's dishonest to apply for a job you don't
| meet the listed qualifications for. As long as you don't
| represent yourself via your resume or in your other
| communication as having experience or qualifications that
| you don't have, it's the equivalent of saying, "I know
| you want AAA, but would you take AA instead?" It's the
| same as offering a lower-than-asking-price bid on a car
| or house.
|
| Nearly all business interaction is a form of negotiation.
| If you look at a job description and feel that you'd be
| able to succeed at it, that's usually enough to get
| started. Clicking "Apply" doesn't mean you are certifying
| that you meet the minimum requirements. It simply means
| you'd like to be considered for the job. The worst that
| could happen is you've wasted somebody's time (which is
| true of probably 90% or more of all interviews anyway).
|
| In my 15 years in software, I've interviewed at probably
| a couple dozen different places. Not once have I been
| asked to promise that I meet the listed minimum
| qualifications prior to submitting an application.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _they 're requirements if you're not willing to break
| the rules_
|
| It's an application. You're applying. It's one thing to
| say the job description is misleading. It's quite another
| to presume someone applying while not technically
| qualified is being dishonest.
| mycall wrote:
| > On the other hand, if you're applying to a local dinosaur
| of a tech company that pays below-average compensation and
| takes 3 months to respond to candidates, all bets are off.
|
| The key word here is tech company. There are many other
| sectors that employee below average labor for HR recruitment
| but the work an engineer can do there can be quite amazing,
| especially when the engineer realizes there is lots of room
| to innovate and optimize their workforce and what/how they
| output.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I think where things fall down is on hiring junior
| candidates, or people re-entering the job market after years
| out of it (like my wife). "Minimum requirements" in those
| cases actually have a very deleterious impact because they
| filter out people with intrinsic motivation or talent but
| slightly different experience backgrounds. Either by the HR
| person themselves (who usually doesn't care much because it's
| a junior position, etc.) or the candidate (who gets put off
| by the min requirements label).
| michaelt wrote:
| _> Hiring managers aren't dumb. Companies paying high six
| figures or more for engineers aren't dumb._
|
| Are you looking at the same Facebook job advert as me?
| Wildgoose wrote:
| My brother has a very senior role (non-IT). Probably in the
| top 5 in the UK, possibly even top 3, out of perhaps 30-35
| jobs? Proven long-term record.
|
| He was going to transfer to a different company and was told
| that company rules meant he had to go through HR "as a
| formality".
|
| He was blocked by his HR interviewer on the grounds that he
| was too successful and therefore wouldn't be "hungry" enough
| for such a competitive position.
|
| He couldn't believe it. They didn't want someone with a
| proven record of repeated long-term success?
|
| The person who was trying to recruit him was furious, but as
| my brother said, this was indicative of a wider problem, and
| so he declined to move there. Instead he won his Industry
| Award for the following year at the company he did move
| to....
| [deleted]
| javajosh wrote:
| I would interpret that as a face-saving way for the HR
| person to say: you're too good to work here, and will feel
| alienated and alone surrounded by comparative mediocrity
| and incompetence. Then, as a cherry on top, they
| _demonstrated_ the truth of the implicit assertion.
|
| In the end, I'd say that HR person did your brother a
| solid.
| michaelbuckbee wrote:
| I'd interpret it differently as well - that the HR person
| realized that the compensation they could pay would not
| match what was required and they didn't want to deal with
| woo'ing the candidate only to offer a lowball offer they
| would refuse.
| yellowstuff wrote:
| Based on the story it's also entirely possible that the
| HR person just disliked the guy for some unrelated
| reason, or had someone else in mind for the role, and
| came up a plausible excuse for the rejection.
| watwut wrote:
| I would interpret it as HR excluding him due to something
| else, possibly for random reason and then making
| rationalization/excuse.
| geoduck14 wrote:
| I've interviewed people before and thought "I'm going to
| reject you, and you should thank me".
|
| To be clear, not all of the jobs I've hired for sucked.
| But there was one project that was designed to chew up
| your soul (mine included), and we had very specific
| requirements- and people that had "extra" skills weren't
| qualified. I learned A LOT from that project.
| DelightOne wrote:
| What design can chew up your soul? Never heard that
| before.
| pope_meat wrote:
| I imagine writing software that IDs people so a drone can
| drop a bomb on their head would make one feel terrible.
|
| Or those automated gun turrets?
| walshemj wrote:
| Working for doorstep lending or payday loan companies
| that prey on poor people.
| throwaway_egbs wrote:
| Really wish you'd been on my last hiring panel. (Quit
| after six months.)
| rvba wrote:
| Probably thr HR representative wanted to hire their
| friend or family. Lots of companies dont screen for
| hiring family members that and dont have any policy
| against it.
| phekunde wrote:
| I had a similar personal experience. I was hired by the
| technical team at a very big company(after 6 interviews; 3
| face-to-face and 3 remote), but the HR was not sure. All my
| experience before that was working for smaller companies.
| The argument the HR made was that I will not survive in the
| big company as most of my experience was with smaller
| companies. The HR was right. In a year I just could not
| stand the inefficiency and waste of talent at the company.
| I moved to another division within the same company. The
| same story repeated. I left the company after 2 years.
| Interestingly I was not the only one. This was a major
| problem at the company. But the company is so big that it
| does not even care if people leave as there are a lot of
| engineers knocking at the door every single day to get in!
| walshemj wrote:
| Why did not the recruiting person and their peers not
| informally / formally complain about HR.
| bombcar wrote:
| "Hungry" sounds like "salary wouldn't match".
| gentleman11 wrote:
| I was turned down in screening interviews last week for not
| enough experience in tools - hr thought were critical but they
| clearly weren't. Why use non technical hr?
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > You might even find that your candidate pool is exactly the
| people you are already working with.
|
| I call this fingerprinting.
|
| If there's 5 different choices for each layer and there's 5
| different layers, assuming an even distribution, there's 3k
| combinations right there. If you require that combo, you've
| just eliminated 99.97% of candidates.
|
| It's not just an IT problem.
|
| "We want someone with experience in (already niche industry)
| but uses our (unusual choice of) system".
|
| I get the problem you're trying to solve with a shovel-ready
| candidate, but...
| krick wrote:
| I'm not sure the answer to that could be generalized, probably
| depends on the company and HRs in question. I, for one, had a
| very difficult time explaining to HRs that I don't care if a
| candidate had any experience with PHP whatsoever (it was the
| "main" language in that company), given he is simply ready to
| use it in a future job. I'm pretty sure they felt like they
| know better than me. Apparently, the idea that being good in
| programming and being proficient with a specific language are
| quite tangentially related skills is difficult to grasp.
|
| I can only hope that other HRs in other companies are a bit
| more useful.
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| For certain things HR considers it set in stone.
|
| For example, when dealing with accounting jobs, they'll
| sometimes ask for specific certifications.
|
| We've ended up just basically saying "3 years experience with
| developing software" and shoved everything else into "some of
| the following would be nice".
| magpieengineer wrote:
| I wonder if the problem is calling them programming
| 'languages'. Learning a new human language is hard, learning
| a new programming language not so much. You wouldn't hire
| someone for a job requiring Spanish if they spoke Russian
| instead. For non-technical people the metaphor around
| 'languages' might be confusing.
| everyone wrote:
| Note: Not relevant comment!
|
| In 'Masters of DOOM' Carmack explained his process for making
| anything.. As I understand it, first do the absolute simplest,
| easiest implementation you can think of.. and if it's fit for
| purpose (passes benchmarks, whatever) happy days! move on to the
| next highest priority thing.
|
| I follow this almost religiously.
|
| The CEO / business guy at my company is the opposite tho, he is a
| perfectionist. Usually he tells people to do more work and polish
| things, and I tell them that its done, move on, keep going and
| get it all roughed out 1st, maybe return and polish later.
|
| Just thought I'd share and see what peoples thoughts here are on
| this + do they have any good anecdotes.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I'm hiring a few people this summer and it felt so good to have
| the power to decide:
|
| - not to include anything re: education requirements
|
| - for Sr. to be 5 years experience and Jr. to be 2 years.
|
| Kudos to HR departments that give you this latitude.
| weinzierl wrote:
| I get
|
| _" Sorry, something went wrong."_
|
| _" We're working on getting this fixed as soon as we can."_
|
| Has anyone made a screenshot or archived it otherwise?
| aranchelk wrote:
| Specifically for engineering jobs, I've learned to regard boosted
| requirements very much like the high pressure interview.
|
| Not only are you needlessly screening out great candidates, in
| terms of personality you're often disqualifying the absolute best
| candidates.
| lmilcin wrote:
| I think listing all technologies used in the project as
| requirement is a huge problem. I have personally learned to
| ignore large part of this and apply even if I don't know
| everything (and then make sure the client understands). But I
| know a lot of candidates treat requirements as gospel.
|
| Rather than doing that I try to list only most important ones as
| requirement, and everything else as part of description of the
| project.
|
| So, the description for senior Java dev might look like this: We
| require very good knowledge of Java (11) and experience with
| Spring applications. Other than that our project uses ... (list
| of technology stack, databases, etc. follows)
| CalChris wrote:
| My first job, I was hired by the hiring manager and sent to HR
| for paperwork. HR didn't like that.
| tombert wrote:
| I feel like this is a lesson that basically any college dropout
| learns fairly quickly: the job requirements simply aren't. If you
| have the ability to do the job, and pass the interview, it's not
| too hard to get companies to overlook your lack of formal
| education.
|
| Until _very_ recently, I was a college dropout who managed to
| finagle my way into senior-level positions at big companies, and
| I think it 's mostly because I almost never bother even reading
| the "requirements" section of a job posting, instead applying to
| anything that seems interesting.
| huhtenberg wrote:
| It really irks me that John ended up in Facebook _and_ decided to
| stay there. It 's just... wrong.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Have you tried the product he worked on?
|
| Oculus has done extremely impressive hardware and software for
| VR and created the only viable mass market headset in the world
| and most importantly managed to ship consistently.
|
| If he wanted to work on that there isn't really another company
| that he could have worked at. Valve doesn't take it seriously
| enough, and personally I believe they would have actually
| abandoned it already if Oculus hadn't been competing with them,
| they just lack the ambition and making hardware successful is
| infinitely more work than just running a videogame store.
| huhtenberg wrote:
| No, I haven't and I won't as it has FB attached to it, which
| is a real pity, because it does indeed look very interesting.
|
| But that's off the point. It's not the product I'm salty
| about.
| bluedino wrote:
| Probably makes over a half a million a year and can do pretty
| much whatever he wants.
| xenihn wrote:
| He easily makes way more than that. E5s can hit 500k with
| refreshers and stock appreciation. I would be shocked if he's
| making less than 2 million. Not that he even needs it.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| HR ask for god himself, hoping to hire a prophet, the best they
| get are believers.
| oldsklgdfth wrote:
| I work for a large corp. We used to get resumes from HR (not sure
| what filtering they did) and follow up with a phone screening. If
| that went well there was an hour interview and a panel interview.
| I don't think our process was the best.
|
| Recently, hiring was overhauled. Every office that needs
| engineers submits a list of requirements. All interviewing is
| handled by a hiring panel that consists of HR and engineers with
| relevant experience, but who do not work on the team or with the
| project. The hiring panel hires people without any interaction
| between the team and the candidate and without any input from the
| team.
|
| Basically, we sent in a posting and they send us an engineer. I'm
| curious to see how this plays out, though I'm not very hopeful. I
| think someone looked at how much money was being spent on
| staffing at the lower level and decided to consolidate it.
|
| Anyone have similar experience?
| kingnothing wrote:
| This is how all of the FAANG companies hire.
| oldsklgdfth wrote:
| Does this mean the applicant doesn't interact with the team
| before getting hired? This seems strange to me. I would like
| to interact with team members before I accept a job.
| fzil wrote:
| I am not sure how it is at the more experienced levels but
| for new grads and juniors you apply for the company, then
| have a "general" interview (think leetcode, some nominal
| system design stuff). If you clear the bar, you proceed to
| some team matching stage (this where the companies start to
| differ). Your experience and your input is taken into
| account and you are matched with a team where you fit in
| best. Some companies have the team manager talk to the new
| candidate to check for fit, others have different
| processes.
| somethingabo wrote:
| This is not how Apple hires.
| [deleted]
| bitwize wrote:
| Unless you have an in (like, I don't know, being John Carmack),
| what's listed on the req are hard requirements.
| not2b wrote:
| Sometimes when a job listing shows impossible requirements, it's
| because they already know who they want to hire for it and they
| are just going through the motions. For example, if a US company
| wants to hire a specific person on an H1B visa, they have to show
| that they couldn't hire a US citizen or permanent resident for
| the job. And if the person they hire doesn't fit the requirements
| either, they don't worry about that because it's very unlikely
| that anyone would ever check each individual hire.
| KIFulgore wrote:
| I've seen several job postings requiring 10 years' experience
| with the cloud platform I work with. It released in 2015.
|
| I always go by the "75% rule" - if I meet 75% of requirements
| they ask for, I apply. You never know who actually wrote and
| contributed to the posting. The requirements can be far removed
| from what the hiring manager actually cares about.
|
| https://www.manager-tools.com/2010/06/career-tools-rule-job-...
| jasonladuke0311 wrote:
| Prime example here; you can tell which lines were added by
| HR/execs:
|
| https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/2477201397/
| maccard wrote:
| The most straightforward example of how this happens is: -
| we're hiring a principal engineer. That is 10+ years experience
| - engineering says required skills are ML & Graphics
| Programming. - our handbook says graphics programmers have
| degrees
|
| And the listing gets made by doing: for each requirement, (role
| number of years - 2) years experience in (requirement).
| DarkmSparks wrote:
| Experience leading consumer-based projects with industry-wide
| impact
|
| Everything definitely had some impact across every industry, not
| always good.
|
| Proven cross-functional partner, working across functions to
| drive solutions
|
| CS, electronics and economics.
|
| Experience in mentoring/influencing senior engineers across
| organizations
|
| 7 years guest university lecturer
|
| 12+ years of experience in programming languages (Python, C++,
| Java or R) with a technical background
|
| Started in 1997
|
| 8+ years of experience in one or more of the following areas:
| machine learning, recommendation systems, pattern recognition,
| NLP, data mining, or artificial intelligence Master's degree in
| Computer Science, Mathematics or related technical field
|
| Build and deployed 20 or 30 projects in all areas since 1997 PhD
| in economics and computer science
|
| Highly experienced in the mobile graphics pipeline and
| interaction across display and optics
|
| only been doing that for 10 years or so.
|
| Experience in encoding/compression technologies in graphics
| display pipeline
|
| dds isn't that special
|
| Experience in working with graphics hardware and drivers on
| mobile platforms
|
| vulkan crashes a lot.
|
| ____ Now mine.
|
| #1 Not US based
|
| #2 Not an evil company
|
| .... Oh dear, good luck everyone.
| b20000 wrote:
| probably wouldn't pass the leetcode bullshit either, hiring is
| broken
| EvilEy3 wrote:
| Yeah, no. He would.
| yupper32 wrote:
| One of the first things I learned in the field as a professional,
| even during college, was to basically ignore the listed
| requirements and apply anyway.
|
| Is this not common knowledge?
| ianbicking wrote:
| It common knowledge for some people, that's why these positions
| still get filled. It's also been observed that for people who
| are less confident they belong in a position that they will
| self-exclude themselves from these jobs, which includes all the
| groups of people who are already underrepresented in the field.
| dalbasal wrote:
| The way HR communicates (requirements are a communication) is
| asymmetrical. Within HR, you are regularly exposed to examples.
| These requirements yielded these resumes, these hires... A lot of
| this is temporal and demand sensitive. That allows people
| involved to develop nuance that outsiders (like those applying)
| can't intuit... like the nuanced language that dealers of exotic
| livestock or antiques develop.
|
| Anyway... these aren't to be taken too literally.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| And how many of those requirements are not even real? A prior job
| wanted experience with test driven development. We skimped on
| testing and there certainly was no TDD.
| gorpomon wrote:
| Certainly learning about TDD and trying to practice it has some
| benefits, it can really help you suss out some edge cases of
| your API designs. But at this point I've professionally done
| some level of work with around 200 developers and never once
| seen actual TDD practiced.
| htrp wrote:
| You mean you don't just test everything in prod?
| randompass wrote:
| I'm in my early thirties, and I have been applying to remote jobs
| since this pandemic started. I still have not landed a single
| interview.
|
| I was an active "reverse code engineer" around 2005-2011, I
| worked on reversing popular software protections on both Windows
| & Symbian, and was involved with a certain famous (at the time)
| team that released tutorials on those subjects under pseudonyms.
|
| That was back when I was in high school and early years into
| college.
|
| I live in a third world country, and in my early twenties I
| dropped out of college to support my family.
|
| I built a business that's unrelated to tech and the pandemic put
| an end to that, so I started thinking about applying to remote
| jobs thinking that I can easily land an interview and ace it.
|
| Well, the problem was getting an interview.
|
| I worked extensively with x86 ASM (MASM, FASM), wrote
| packers/unpackers in C back in the day, wrote extensions for IDA
| at some point. When I built the family business, I had free time
| so over the last few years and I've learned and used a few other
| languages (Golang, Rust).
|
| I've been doing LC and LC-like problems over the years, so I can
| comfortably solve most DSA problems that I've seen thrown at
| FAANG candidates, tackled system design questions as well, so I'm
| familiar with SW architectures of modern software.
|
| However, since I don't have a college degree, nor an active
| online portfolio (github and the like), I don't meet any
| requirements for any of these jobs which I can do better than a
| large portion of the SWEs complaining on Blind about their 6
| figure TC and how awful WLB is at Facebook. I could do their jobs
| at a fraction of the TC.
|
| Unfortunately, I was an idiot and dropped out of college.
| filleduchaos wrote:
| I'm not sure how to phrase this in a blameless manner but the
| problem almost certainly is not the fact that you dropped out
| of college. In my experience (and the experience of most people
| I know who've applied for remote roles), implicit location/time
| zone requirements have been a way bigger disqualifier than
| education.
|
| I'm also from a third world country (and not one with the best
| of reputations). I don't have a degree either and have way less
| work experience (or experience of any kind!) than you do. But
| I've found and held remote jobs, not with ease, but I did it. I
| _did_ go through a period where it seemed I could not get a
| single interview, and what I eventually realised after feeling
| very sorry for myself was that I needed to both package myself
| better (my CV, while nicely formatted and free of errors, was
| pretty bad at conveying my strengths) _and_ target my job
| search better. There are companies out there that are actually
| remote-friendly (or even remote-first), are open to hiring
| people outside North America and Europe, care about experience
| over tertiary education, and compensate well. Yet I kept
| applying to roles I _knew_ I didn 't have an equal (or any!)
| shot at largely because the companies were popular.
| kingnothing wrote:
| For me, as a hiring manager, the part that sticks out is "I
| live in a 3rd world country." That's going to make it hard for
| the majority of companies to hire you. They don't have a
| business presence there, they don't know the laws, taxation,
| etc. You're also not going to have timezone overlap with the
| rest of the remote team you might work with. Very few companies
| will even look at your resume because of that.
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| And lack of higher education and professional experience
| makes him ineligible for any kind of visa.
| xeromal wrote:
| Yup, really, that's the only thing that matters.
| scrollaway wrote:
| I'm looking for people that match the background you have.
| Email me.
| vthallam wrote:
| Sorry about your situation. I would suggest doing two things.
| 1. Build a github profile. Do some interesting side projects
| that shows you can code. They don't have to super complex,
| small scripts that are useful or a CRUD web app is fine. 2.
| Make a linkedin account, add a bunch of recruiters, people from
| FAANG and start ups, start sharing your side projects on
| linkedin.
|
| Do cold reach outs to recruiters on LinkedIn. This is all a lot
| of work obviously, but it will work. Don't worry about college
| degrees, no one really cares tbh. Good Luck!
| pandesal wrote:
| Your advice is pretty good but it only really applies to
| junior level roles.
|
| If you're applying for mid level up and the only relevant
| experience you have for the role is a github profile with
| side projects, thats not going be enough to get an interview.
| Recruiters who screen candidates won't even check out github
| profiles let alone evaluate their content.
|
| Degrees are not really a hard barrier nowadays to get
| interviews. What's important is relevant experience. OP
| doesn't sound like they have relevant professional experience
| to the roles they're applying for. which is probably why they
| are not getting interviews and is incorrectly blaming their
| lack of degree as the reason
| gentleman11 wrote:
| I have a portfolio site and had several interviews
| recently. Zero page views
| vishnugupta wrote:
| If you are based in India please email me: hn@arunj.net.
|
| We are a small bootstrapped SaaS looking for backend engineers.
| htrp wrote:
| My advice for you... lie and say you have one. (Or just get one
| from a diploma mill)
| vishnugupta wrote:
| This is a terrible advice, please don't do this. If found out
| you will not only be blacklisted by the company but also by
| all the companies of recruiters network. Not worth it.
| pandesal wrote:
| Not a single interview? That's got to be a incredible amount
| bad luck because it's a pretty hot market right now for SWE.
|
| Like I'm a high school dropout who also doesn't have an active
| online portfolio and I currently work as a SWE at a tech
| company but I'm on a search for a new remote role in the last
| month or so and have done multiple interviews for remote roles.
| Even FAANG recruiters have reached out for interviews. A lot of
| job postings don't even list a degree as a requirement or nice-
| to-have.
|
| Are you only missing a degree when you look at job postings?
| Because while I do think there are companies who filter out
| candidates who don't have degrees, I don't believe that it's a
| hard barrier nowadays to not even get a single interview.
|
| If you're missing all of the requirements how do you know you
| can do better than most of the folks who have the role? Seems
| odd to bring down the folks who have the roles you're trying to
| get
| rickspencer3 wrote:
| That sucks, I'm sorry. It sounds like what you really need is a
| network. You get interviews from ex-colleagues and friends when
| you don't have a reputation that speaks for itself.
| wsc981 wrote:
| I thought the following comment from the Twitter thread was kinda
| funny:
|
| _> "So basically they've already given it to Michael Abrash but
| HR said they have to look open minded."_
| twobitshifter wrote:
| It's actually not that much of a joke (although it may not be
| Abrash) - often higher level positions have the job listing
| tailored to only one candidate that they already know is
| interested. To satisfy legal you have to advertise the position
| externally and internally but if you want someone specific
| setting unreasonable minimum requirements, that only they have,
| is a way to get there. Similar things happen in consulting
| contracts all the time. The RFP will be written for a
| particular company.
| draw_down wrote:
| It seems to me like this is the proper takeaway here.
|
| In general I agree tech job ads have requirements that don't
| make sense. But here it seems like they already know who
| they're going to hire, whether it's Abrash or someone else.
| jobigoud wrote:
| As far as I know Michael Abrash doesn't have 8+ years of
| experience in machine learning either.
| skunkworker wrote:
| One of the "minimum requirements"
|
| " 8+ years of experience in one or more of the following areas:
| machine learning, recommendation systems, pattern recognition,
| NLP, data mining, or artificial intelligence"
| dcolkitt wrote:
| IMO using pre-determined time windows to filter on experience
| is always a mistake. Smart people acquire mastery in much
| shorter chronological time. This is literally the definition of
| intelligence and it's been repeatedly verified over decades by
| industrial psychology.
|
| If Linus Torvalds decided to pick up data engineering tomorrow,
| he'd be far better at it in 3 months than the average dev who's
| been in the field for 10 years.
|
| When you filter on years of experience, you're inadvertently
| biasing towards less intelligent candidates. Smart people with
| that much experience will have enough mastery that they're not
| looking for a mid level position. Polymaths who jump between
| fields, quickly building up competence won't meet your
| arbitrary threshold.
| tester34 wrote:
| >If Linus Torvalds decided to pick up data engineering
| tomorrow, he'd be far better at it in 3 months than the
| average dev who's been in the field for 10 years.
|
| bold claim, I'd want to take a bet with you for real money on
| that
|
| decade ago was 2011, wasn't it time where applied data
| engineering started becoming cool? thus majority of people
| shouldnt be those, who started learing it due to $$, but out
| of curiosity?
|
| idk
| test_epsilon wrote:
| He kind of already did that -- designed and wrote git in a
| month.
| emodendroket wrote:
| But isn't that ultimately what these job listings "mean"? We
| want someone who has a certain level of mastery of this
| concept? YOE is just a shorthand.
| lostcolony wrote:
| So you agree that the minimum requirements they list aren't
| what the actual minimum requirements are, nor even what the
| company desires.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Sure, in the sense that my car isn't literally powered by
| hundreds of horses either.
| lostcolony wrote:
| So there is an industry standard somewhere for how to
| translate YOE -> actual acquired knowledge? And everyone
| adheres to that?
| cm2012 wrote:
| The best person I've ever hired at four years experience in a
| field. He smoked people with 8-15 years experience.
| ratww wrote:
| _> Smart people acquire mastery in much shorter chronological
| time_
|
| ...and lots of people don 't, even after 10 years working in
| the field. Not because they're not smart, of course, but it's
| common.
| marcinzm wrote:
| Machine learning, data mining and pattern recognition aren't
| brand new fields in any meaning of the word. I've had classes
| on them 20 years ago in college and I know a lot of people with
| 8+ years of experience (including myself). Hell, my dad worked
| on them when he was in college 40+ years ago.
|
| Facebook pays more than enough to get world class experts so
| why would they not aim to hire them?
| yangminded wrote:
| That's entirely feasible. Mind that 8 years ago was 2013 and
| systems like the recommendation system from Amazon was already
| online. Also it only specifies machine learning, pattern
| recognition, NLP etc - all of which are active research fields
| for far more then 20 years already.
|
| It's not like they are asking for more than 8 years of
| experience in Pytorch.
| user-the-name wrote:
| Sure, it's feasible on its own.
|
| But the position is for working on graphics rendering, a
| _completely unrelated_ field. Are you supposed to have had
| two careers at the same time, working eight years in AI while
| also working all that same time on graphics?
| mkr-hn wrote:
| There's a lot of research on using AI/ML with graphics.
| I've seen demos people have done using it to create HD
| remasters of shows originally in SD on tape or too-small
| film, or where there wasn't much interest from IP owners in
| doing it. Or where, once you expanded sideways, there was
| too much crew or rough set to use it.
|
| Since Facebook is doing VR, and this position is about VR,
| I can easily see the potential of using ML to make the most
| of sketchy/low-quality models and textures people might
| want to use in worlds. Imagine if you could upload a rough
| model, describe what you want, and get it made for you.
| seoaeu wrote:
| Yeah, but back in 2013? Most of what you're talking about
| is much more recent. To have 8 years of AI/ML expertise
| already while also previously being a graphics expert
| requires a very improbable career progression
| Scarblac wrote:
| Yes, but _on mobile_? With details like "graphics
| hardware and drivers on mobile platforms" and "the mobile
| graphics pipeline and interaction across display and
| optics".
|
| I mean obviously a lot of people work in that area but
| the overlap with AI/ML simultaneously seems very small,
| for 8+ years in one person.
|
| And of course if you're in research then it's hard to
| tick boxes like "leading consumer-based projects with
| industry-wide impact" and "mentoring/influencing senior
| engineers across organizations" and so on.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| [snip; not enough coffee]
| user-the-name wrote:
| Try re-reading the post you responded to.
| Aerroon wrote:
| But how many people are also going to be "highly experienced
| in the mobile graphics pipeline"? Isn't that also about ~10
| years old?
| marcinzm wrote:
| When you're willing to pay a million+ a year you just need
| a couple people.
| thrill wrote:
| When you are willing to pay a million+ a year you already
| know who you want to hire.
| dalbasal wrote:
| Feasible, but in a naive sense. much sk
|
| The number of people working in "those areas," defined
| narrowly, is _much_ bigger than it was eight years ago. That
| makes this a big requirement. People who are skilled, deep or
| enthusiastic enough to make that 8 years experience better
| than 4 are not likely to just show up, while also ticking the
| other boxes. Narrowing the pool _past a certain point_ is a
| different type of problem.
|
| In any case, these aren't to be taken to literally.
| sbarre wrote:
| While I agree the overall minimum requirements for this job are
| a bit silly, most (all?) of those topics have been around for
| more than 8 years, in some shape or form.
| CrazyStat wrote:
| Each requirement taken individually is plausible, but the
| intersection of them all is absurd.
| sbarre wrote:
| Agreed! Perhaps that's why the listing says "one or more"
| and not "all"
| CrazyStat wrote:
| It only says that about the various ML/AI requirements,
| which is a single bullet point. That doesn't help the
| intersection between bullet points, which is the issue.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Almost anybody who meets the intersection of all those
| requirements isn't checking LinkedIn or other job listings.
| They're already employed, or being courted directly by
| prospective employers.
| viraptor wrote:
| For NLP, the famous Alice is from 1995 and ELIZA is from
| 1960s. You can easily have 8 years of experience in this
| area.
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| Eliza is like 8 if conditions. It's a parlor trick
| viraptor wrote:
| It doesn't matter how simple it was. For its time, that
| was the state of art as far as I can tell.
|
| There's lots of things invented decades ago that would be
| a parlor trick today.
| pmontra wrote:
| It seems that the whole AI field was started four or five years
| ago but actually it's several decades old. A recent example:
| for how long did Amazon use recommendation systems? And data
| mining was called OLAP [1] in the 90s and probably with another
| name in the 60s.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_analytical_processing
| 988747 wrote:
| Professor Geoffrey Hinton would have 30+ years of experience
| with machine learning, I think.
| htrp wrote:
| Can't hire... failed the leetcode test
| long_time_gone wrote:
| But probably 0 years experience in "the mobile graphics
| pipeline and interaction across display and optics", which is
| the actual job.
| duxup wrote:
| I worked at a job for nearly 20 years. Good job, good people,
| really hard to leave. The folks at the company who hired me at
| the time (dot.com era) "Just wanted people who could think about
| second order effects". They didn't care about resume much. They
| wanted "thinkers".
|
| I worked in tech support and had a great relationship with
| engineering and etc. They'd ask tickets get assigned to me
| because they knew I was honest and thorough when it came to
| documentation and etc. It was a good gig.
|
| Eventually we were acquired and before selling the company off as
| pieces they laid a huge % of people off, including myself (it was
| ok, I was ready to move on / and would eventually change
| careers).
|
| The company that got a bunch of the engineers eventually needed
| support people and the engineers reached out to me to apply. I
| applied.
|
| But the job requirements had changed, masters degree required. I
| no longer qualified (I didn't / don't even have a degree). I
| applied, but didn't make it past new company's filters. The
| engineers were told that if I didn't make it through the filter
| they wouldn't consider me.
|
| 20 years doing that job in one form or another, and there's maybe
| a handful of people who know the proprietary side of their
| equipment... but no masters = not even considered for job.
|
| This was a technical job to be sure but it was largely IP (and
| some proprietary stuff) networking troubleshooting. You could
| take capable high school students and they could do it with some
| good guidance.
|
| The hiring people industrial complex is insane.
| shezi wrote:
| When I worked at a small consultancy, we had similar
| requirements, Masters or higher. I asked our hiring manager
| (who himself was a 22-year-old student) why they did that. He
| told me that in any week they'd get 100 applicants, while
| hiring only about one dev per month. Sure, by requiring a
| degree they'd weed out a handful of great people, but also
| literal hundreds of idiots. And while there are idiots with
| degrees (as evidenced by the 80:1 hiring ratio), the number is
| apparently much smaller than for the general population.
|
| I did not and do not agree with the practice, but I can also
| understand why it is in place.
| clutchdude wrote:
| This reminded me of another story I read in 2012 that was
| actually posted here.
|
| Any sort of low level job would easily get 200+ applications.
| A hiring manager threw away half the resumes to cut down on
| review time: "I don't like unlucky people."
|
| 1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3804134
|
| 2 - https://web.archive.org/web/20130116104843/http://raganwa
| ld....
| randcraw wrote:
| It's probably lucky you were rejected. Almost certainly, that's
| not the same company you left. Large corporations attract cost-
| cutting groupthinking bureaucrats and heavyweight processes
| governed by straightjacket apps like SAP or Office 365. In that
| world, everyone is a replaceable cog in the machine.
| vmception wrote:
| > It's probably lucky you were rejected.
|
| Toxic positivity.
|
| Its just as likely that their prior company was also doing
| _something_ to candidates that wouldn 't allow candidates to
| guess that it was a good job with good people.
|
| There is really no filter that allows a candidate to know if
| their specific team or work environment is going to be good
| or bad.
| duxup wrote:
| Agreed. When I heard I got filtered by default ... I didn't
| really want to work there. It was a red flag for me as far as
| if I wanted to ever be there.
|
| If they can't hire a guy who knows their product up down left
| and right, not sure I want to be there while they reinvent
| the wheel and hire more people who just check HR boxes. Seems
| like a bad direction to take.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| Many people think that a company is guilty of some
| injustice if they don't respond to a qualified candidate,
| as if the job of the company was to correctly assess every
| candidate as opposed to finding one to hire in the least
| possible cost. Of course good candidates are going to be
| screened out, the job of the company is not to test
| everyone but only to find one. When there are 1000
| candidates applying for a position and you have at most 100
| hours of people's time to spend on phonescreens and panel
| interviews, then you are much better off throwing out 95%
| of your candidates and only spending resources on assessing
| the 5% than trying to spread your resources over assessing
| each of the 1000. Even randomly tossing job applications is
| much better than trying to assess everyone. But if random
| tossing is needed, why not toss based on
| qualifications/keywords?
| feoren wrote:
| Because random tossing is guaranteed to not come with a
| bias, whereas tossing based on keywords may introduce
| negative biases. Example: tossing out everyone that
| doesn't have a particular Microsoft certification is
| probably going to significantly _reduce_ the average
| quality of remaining candidates. There 's also the Game
| Theory aspect: if everyone else is hiring the gems out of
| a small pool (e.g. Master's, only young, white, etc.)
| then you get a better average by considering the outcast
| pool rather than by throwing out the same people everyone
| else is.
| hinkley wrote:
| I have always not-so-secretly wondered if the degree
| escalation is really about establishing a cushy eco chamber
| and nothing at all to do with attaining operational
| excellence.
|
| There's probably an ACLU case in there at some point, given
| all the -isms that are implied by this spurt of activity.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| It's really just about making hiring easier. If you can say
| that someone with a Master's in CS will know all these
| things we think are important, then you can set the bar at
| MSCS and ignore all the people with a BS even if they have
| the same knowledge.
|
| Having the MS means you filter out a bunch of people that
| may or may not have the skill you need. The filter reduces
| the number of resumes you need to evaluate.
|
| It's stupid, but makes sense in the eyes of HR and as long
| as you can fill your pipeline with enough people, it works.
| DrNuke wrote:
| A new trend is experienced candidates now asking for tech specs
| or six-month Gantt plans before starting contact with any HR
| person, in that trying to by-pass most of the bs.
| easton wrote:
| Is the sole requirement Carmack doesn't meet the masters degree?
| If so, he has more than enough work experience to meet that
| benchmark. If you don't meet one of the other requirements (like
| if you know nothing about mobile graphics rendering or have never
| been an architect before) I'm willing to bet they'd pass.
| onion2k wrote:
| They certainly would, and that's why it's a problem. The advert
| is not designed to find the best candidate. It's designed so
| that anyone who believes the requirements doesn't apply _even
| if they would be the best candidate_. The point is not that you
| need a masters degree (you don 't if they'd accept someone
| without one); the point is to stop people who don't have
| masters degrees from applying because the team that wrote the
| advert don't want to work with people who don't have degrees
| _even if they 're as brilliant as Carmack_.
|
| Job adverts are filters. Some job adverts are written to
| encourage _certain people_ not to apply.
| NullPrefix wrote:
| I'm sorry to break the bad news to you, but unfortunately the
| machine says no. You are more than welcome to apply again after
| a year :)
| _wldu wrote:
| It seems some sort of real-world sanity check on the requirements
| would be useful.
| supportlocal4h wrote:
| I tend to think such requirements are helpful to me if I were
| job seeking. It helps to avoid an employment situation with an
| organization that doesn't really know its own needs, or is
| trying to cover three bases with a single hire. Dysfunctional
| job postings often (though not always) indicate an undesirable
| situation.
| moron4hire wrote:
| Job listings are written like this to give the illusion of being
| an equal opportunity employer. It's meant to be impossible to
| fill, through the front door, because they are holding out for
| someone coming through on a personal recommendation. Because
| people _tend_ to only socialize with people just like themselves,
| personal recommendations for jobs end up reinforcing the existing
| corporate culture.o
| [deleted]
| __s wrote:
| It's a bit facetious, since as much as people like to cite the
| Homebrew Google example, the reality is that Carmack should have
| a network which allows him to already have the job before the
| interview
|
| Still, it's true. I've done hiring at a small company where the
| job listing had a bunch of random tech we used, meanwhile we were
| desperate to talk to anyone with more experience than a bit of
| school & working at a pizzeria (& we didn't care for education if
| they had non zero programming work experience). But our salaries
| weren't competitive. Demonstrated experience matters more than
| credentials. I worked there a couple years before looking for a
| better job as a substitute for post secondary
| phkahler wrote:
| I understand the FB angle for VR now. I've been playing a lot of
| Echo VR (recommended BTW) and the social aspect of the game is
| very important. Unfortunately the "party" and "friend" systems
| are absolute dog shit in terms of reliability. So many bugs, so
| often people join a party and can not figure out how to relocate
| to the game or lobby (even when not full) etc... I understand
| that between platform calls and in-game party and working across
| multiple games is challenging. Just saying it's kind of a cluster
| fuck right now. Given that, this rendering architect position
| seems like a low priority for FB at this time from where I sit.
| Huge potential in this though - I have a number of "friends" I
| really enjoy playing with that I've never met IRL and I'm not
| much of a gamer.
| sireat wrote:
| Unsurprising a nice dark pattern on cookies at the job site:
|
| "Some cookies are required to use our services. To continue to
| Facebook, review the available cookie controls and make any
| optional changes you'd like before selecting accept below."
|
| There is only Accept Cookies button.
| davidkunz wrote:
| Carmack really should up his game if he wants to be successful in
| the software development space.
| leokennis wrote:
| I advise him to have a look at the code of classic games like
| Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake. He could pick up a trick or two
| from the geniuses who created those.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yeah, but can he invert an AVL tree on the whiteboard?
| sage76 wrote:
| 'You have 30 minutes, and here's 12 test cases that need to
| pass.'
| eloisius wrote:
| He probably needs to grind on LeetCode for a few months
| before trying to crack FAANG
| [deleted]
| dylan604 wrote:
| Maybe he should spend time learning JS darling language of
| the month?
| gentleman11 wrote:
| Not enough years of experience with react, auto reject
| runawaybottle wrote:
| The name of the game is Leetcode my friend. Maybe he needs
| to do more 'deliberate practice'.
| EvilEy3 wrote:
| I'm sorry to disappoint you, but Carmack would pass those
| with flying colors.
| weisk wrote:
| I would add to the list to study some of the top notch
| algorithms out there, say fast inverse sqrt
| slumdev wrote:
| I bet John Carmack hasn't even solved most Leetcode mediums.
| balabaster wrote:
| This makes me laugh exactly because the number of jobs I've seen
| advertised after I've left them to do other things because they
| weren't challenging enough, only to see that the prerequisites
| posted for the "new" job would've screened me out before I even
| had the chance to interview and are far beyond what is necessary
| to do the job well.
|
| 99% of the jobs that high quality developers could do that
| they're screened out of are because of poor concepts of what is
| needed to be successful.
|
| If someone has decent problem solving and analytical skills, can
| understand the problem domain and has the capacity to learn a new
| language/framework/construct in a short period of time (which
| frankly most of us can, and do with frightening regularity),
| unless you have something miraculously niche and technical,
| they're capable of doing the job. All you need to worry about is
| are they a competent developer and whether they'll be a good
| personality fit for the team.
|
| They say we rise to the level of our incompetence, but most
| developers never really grow out of solving problems and only get
| better with time and experience.
|
| Most degrees and professional certifications are meaningless to
| people who only care about the knowledge - there's no point in
| chasing paper that's out of date the minute the course is
| designed. We don't want that knowledge, it's old. We want current
| information which the courses and qualifications haven't been
| designed for yet.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| > If someone has decent problem solving and analytical skills,
| can understand the problem domain and has the capacity to learn
| a new language/framework/construct in a short period of time
| (which frankly most of us can, and do with frightening
| regularity), unless you have something miraculously niche and
| technical, they're capable of doing the job.
|
| Agreed. And this was how hiring was done up until about 15, 20
| years ago. For example, if you knew C++ they figured you could
| pick up Java. Or if you knew Perl, you could be assumed to be
| able to pick up Ruby or Python. But in recent years that's not
| been the case - you mostly get screened out well prior to any
| human seeing your resume if you don't have all the right
| buzzwords. Hopefully the tightening job market with companies
| (supposedly) having trouble finding people will get us back to
| more sane hiring practices.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > Agreed. And this was how hiring was done up until about 15,
| 20 years ago. For example, if you knew C++ they figured you
| could pick up Java. Or if you knew Perl, you could be assumed
| to be able to pick up Ruby or Python.
|
| That's why FAANG still do whiteboard/algorithm questions.
|
| If implemented properly you get a good idea of who can code
| and solve problems, and who can't. Of course, there are false
| positive and false negatives, but the signal to noise ratio
| is pretty good.
| balabaster wrote:
| This is how I interview as well. Though I usually have a
| fairly good idea who I want based on my network before HR
| ever get involved.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > That's why FAANG still do whiteboard/algorithm questions.
|
| > If implemented properly you get a good idea of who can
| code and solve problems, and who can't. Of course, there
| are false positive and false negatives, but the signal to
| noise ratio is pretty good.
|
| I see the idea, and I try to focus interviews on 'show,
| don't tell', but is there research supporting better
| outcomes?
| ethbr0 wrote:
| I see it as placement of the gatekeeping filter.
|
| Do you trust HR or the hiring team more to filter
| candidates?
|
| It's a valid question. Keyword / minimums tilt the
| balance in HR's direction. Whiteboard / algorithm
| questions tilt towards hiring team.
|
| I essentially hired one guy I interviewed because he
| seemed intelligent and did motorcycle work on his own.
| Had some background in the specific subject, but I'd
| rather hire a demonstrated ability to learn & initiative.
| (Afaict, he's thriving and a great fit for the position)
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Problem is, as the hiring manager you're not going to see
| the resumes that didn't meet the keyword minimum. You're
| only seeing the resumes that made it through the filters.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| Engineering managers should dictate the filter to HR, not
| the other way around. If it's the other way around,
| that's a big red flag.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > I essentially hired one guy I interviewed because he
| seemed intelligent and did motorcycle work on his own.
| Had some background in the specific subject, but I'd
| rather hire a demonstrated ability to learn & initiative.
|
| Me too, and I respond similarly to information like that.
| But the #1 hiring bias is hiring people like yourself.
| It's possibly I am just falling victim to that bias.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > It's a valid question. Keyword / minimums tilt the
| balance in HR's direction. Whiteboard / algorithm
| questions tilt towards hiring team.
|
| Keywords are almost always pointless. I've seen
| extraordinary resumes that ticked all the boxes, yet 20
| minutes in there was not a working FizzBuzz on the door.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > is there research supporting better outcomes?
|
| Sadly it's all empirical.
| kozd wrote:
| Since when is research not considered empirical?
| kh_hk wrote:
| I beg to differ on that. On my experience, both interviewing
| and being interviewed, capacity to learn and adapt to
| different languages and proven experience of having done that
| lifts the bar significally and accounts for most of the
| tecnical requirements, the rest being just practical
| knowledge or solid fundamentals.
|
| For sure there will be places on which the person weeding out
| resumes might miss that a competent programmer on most
| interpreted languages can jump between them and get up to
| speed pretty quick. Such places I would avoid anyway. At
| least on my echo chamber, I thought these were on the
| minority nowadays?
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > most developers never really grow out of solving problems
|
| Do you see that as a maturation process? Is this about moving
| into management?
|
| > Most degrees and professional certifications are meaningless
| to people who only care about the knowledge - there's no point
| in chasing paper that's out of date the minute the course is
| designed. We don't want that knowledge, it's old. We want
| current information which the courses and qualifications
| haven't been designed for yet.
|
| A couple of additions or objections (depending on how some of
| those terms are understood):
|
| If you care only about knowledge, then you don't care if it's
| the latest thing or has any application (though I rarely
| encounter knowledge that has no application). It you care about
| job skills, and about knowledge only to the extent it serves
| those skills, that's a different matter.
|
| Also, you can learn about all those technologies, old and new
| and future ones too, by learning theory. Theory is the most
| applicable knowledge; it applies to and predicts everything -
| just like theories in physics predict how every object behaves,
| now and in the future, not just specific objects in specific
| contexts. Theory empowers you to solve novel problems and learn
| the novel tech.
|
| Generally, I think the best way to learn knowledge, including
| theory, are good degreed programs: They are designed by experts
| (how do you design a course of study for a subject you don't
| know?), you have experts guiding and coaching and mentoring you
| along the way, and you have access to assets from labs to
| libraries to peers.
| balabaster wrote:
| So I can only speak for myself personally. But my perspective
| is that all the stuff on the exams, I already learned long
| before the courses became current and have moved onto the
| next thing. So by the time the course arrives, I no longer
| care about the content it's delivering because I already did
| all that. By the time the course comes available for the
| things I'm learning now, I will already know it and have
| moved onto the next thing. So that's why those who care about
| the knowledge don't tend to care about the certificate -
| because it's a waste of time for us to go back and cram for
| an exam that's based on technology that has evolved (and thus
| the material is out of date/no longer accurate, flat out
| wrong).
| makeitdouble wrote:
| It often resolves to "we want someone that is supposed to be
| 100% efficient from day one"
|
| When that assumption is explicitly discussed and dropped, the
| job postings can be backed to realistic levels of expectations
| and interviewers get more leeway on choosing profiles that
| could be interesting down the line instead of just playing
| Tetris with the listed qualifications.
| balabaster wrote:
| Nobody can be 100% efficient from day one, because even with
| all other things being equal, the new guy still has to learn
| all the idiosyncracies of your existing codebase (which is
| quite likely full of technical debt and poor decisions), your
| team, your process, your management style, your politics.
|
| Realistically, even the basic "we want someone that's 100%
| efficient from day one" is the most unreasonable expectation
| you can have as a hiring manager, and is usually the one
| spurring the "high quality candidate shortage" complaints.
| avgDev wrote:
| IMO, if someone thinks you are going to get much work done
| the first week they are out of their minds, or their
| software is a trivial console app contained in handful of
| classes.
|
| I could probably jump into a new position and start
| cranking out code fast, but it would be different than any
| code in the existing code base, and could apply techniques
| not used by anyone on the team. This would result in an
| awful piece of code to maintain for the team.
|
| There are just so many different ways of writing code that
| a dev would probably need a few weeks to get comfortable
| with the code base. I speak openly about this during
| interviews. One interviewer from a fortune 1k company said
| I would be given about 6 months to get comfortable with the
| code base and start with smaller tasks. Another company
| said I would be building trivial things for a few weeks
| before touching the codebase.
|
| Unless it is a fresh project there is no such a thing as
| jumping in and cranking out code day 1.
| kevinstubbs wrote:
| The best hires I've ever made have started submitting code
| reviews within 24-48 hrs of being onboarded. Sure it's not
| for something like Microsoft Windows, but still this has
| been a hallmark positive indicator of a good hire for me,
| and applicable to many (but not all of course) frontend,
| backend, and app development projects.
|
| Now maybe there is some discussion to have about what "100%
| efficient" means. Of course they will not hit their peak of
| productivity on day 1, and anyways if 100% efficient means
| the most productive day they've ever had, then they will
| more days than not be < maximally productive.
| balabaster wrote:
| I would wager your codebase, tests and development
| environment reflects this. Any product of any
| significance requires a day of setup at least before you
| even get as far as cloning the repo and opening your
| first user story.
| hinkley wrote:
| There's no resume entry for polymath, and what you're
| describing is a developer who is at least a mediocre polymath.
| Not all of us are.
| l33t2328 wrote:
| > Most degrees and professional certifications are meaningless
| to people who only care about the knowledge - there's no point
| in chasing paper that's out of date the minute the course is
| designed.
|
| This is a stretch. Most of what you learn in a CS curriculum is
| extremely useful. Things like algorithms, computer
| organization, object oriented programming, operating systems,
| networking, mathematical approaches, etc. aren't going anywhere
| anytime soon.
| balabaster wrote:
| Fair. Perhaps I was over-zealous to include degrees in my
| statement.
| Clubber wrote:
| My step son is getting into programming and he told me about
| a console app he wrote where he stored the data in a flat
| file. I suggested he look into storing it in json format.
|
| For me, the biggest benefit of a degree is more to show you
| what you don't know in pretty broad strokes. It's up to you
| to investigate deeper either on the street or with a more
| specific curriculum.
|
| Broadening the possibilities of knowledge is pretty big. I've
| known of several otherwise great self-taught developers who
| didn't know much about database design because they just
| never really ran across it.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Yes and no. I have never implemented so much as a linked list
| never mind any more complicated data structures at $JOB.
| These things are provided by standard libraries.
|
| But knowing what they are, and when to use them, is useful.
| As is the general background knowledge when it comes to
| understanding something new (since everything devolves to
| machine language eventually).
| feoren wrote:
| You have never implemented a linked list or _anything more
| complicated_? What the heck do you do all day!? I create
| new data structures all the time!
| Sebb767 wrote:
| > Yes and no. I have never implemented so much as a linked
| list never mind any more complicated data structures at
| $JOB.
|
| And I never divided four digit numbers per hand, yet I
| don't think we should drop the requirement for primary
| school math. I fully agree with your second point, but I
| think the critic is getting too hung up on the vehicle used
| for teaching these concepts. You don't need to implement a
| linked list per hand in your day job, but you need to grasp
| the concept and have an easy task to learn to program on.
| reader_mode wrote:
| So when should you use linked lists ?
|
| My undergrad course didn't say shit about losing cache
| locality + indirection overhead, allocation cost per
| entry, etc. You will almost always be better off using
| whatever the default List implementation is in your
| standard library, and if performance really matters you
| will be better off using some optimized tree or whatever
| fits your use case and measure. Languages these days are
| not C, you are provided with really good defaults,
| reading the usage docs and ignoring the internals will
| yield better results than basic theory without testing
| your assumptions. You really need to know what you are
| doing to beat the standard library offerings - and
| knowing what is available > having a grasp of the
| underpinnings.
|
| Knowing about algorithms can be useful, recognizing your
| data structure is a cyclical graph or a DAG, implications
| of it, knowing how topological sort works, etc. is useful
| - but even there - if you are good with search you can
| find the solution to your problem, you will just take
| more time.
| feoren wrote:
| It's extremely easy to "beat" the standard library
| offerings by incorporating what's unique and specific to
| your situation. They have to be super generic to be in a
| standard library. Of course, don't re-implement a
| _completely generic_ list data structure. But
| implementing a particular kind of dictionary that takes
| advantage of assumptions that are true for your use case
| (but not true in general) and is custom tailored to your
| environment is extremely valuable.
| reader_mode wrote:
| >But implementing a particular kind of dictionary that
| takes advantage of assumptions that are true for your use
| case (but not true in general) and is custom tailored to
| your environment is extremely valuable
|
| This requires way more knowledge than I got from my
| undergrad classes and in comparison learning that part is
| trivial forward to the hard part that you can pick up in
| "refresher" part of a book/article on the topic.
|
| I doubt your average undergrad could do it so I disagree
| with the extremely easy part as well (heck I doubt they
| could write a bug free version in the first place, even
| less a better performing one) that a correctly selected
| std lib container. Well at least not without researching
| and testing a bunch at which point the background
| knowledge is trivial in comparison.
| ant6n wrote:
| From "Masters of Doom":
|
| > In the fall of 1988, the eighteen-year-old Carmack reluctantly
| enrolled at the University of Kansas, where he signed up for an
| entire schedule of computer classes. It was a miserable time. He
| couldn't relate to the students, didn't care about keg parties
| and frat houses. Worse were the classes, based on memorizing
| information from textbooks. There was no challenge, no
| creativity. The tests weren't just dull, they were insulting.
| "Why can't you just give us a project and let us perform it?"
| Carmack scrawled on the back of one of his exams. "I can perform
| anything you want me to!" After enduring two semesters, he
| dropped out.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| It's a common enough story. IIRC Jonathan Blow also dropped out
| of college because it was useless to him other than to secure a
| piece of paper.
| jokoon wrote:
| Yes, not surprised by this. There is a difference between a
| degree and an education. I will repeat this over and over:
| university is a nursery for young adult who have no idea what
| to do with their lives.
|
| I'm not discounting higher education, but to me, degrees are a
| way to filter people by arbitrary forms of selection, and
| calling that "merit", and then justifying that "losers" deserve
| their social status because their failed at school.
|
| Universities should be open for everyone, students would help
| each other, professors and teachers would organize to deliver
| education the best they can. Students who fail to follow will
| just stop coming to classes by themselves. There is no need to
| filter, because eventually, you will filter out students who
| actually learn and have the potential to use that education.
|
| Just keep universities open.
|
| I'm constantly hearing that teachers and professors spend a
| large portion of their time filling paperwork, instead of just
| teaching and helping students.
|
| And I'm not even in the american education system, I live in
| france, which educate a large portion of the best math
| students.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I think the way you create this is to make college education
| free and of good quality for prisoners. To get the general
| public to agree to this, education would have to become free
| for everyone, at any age.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Can't think of anything worse than making it free at this
| point, putting the tax payer on the hook for a disgusting
| and bloated system that has gotten fat from signing young
| people up for predatory loans at a vulnerable point in
| their life.
|
| Only way I'd agree to free higher education would be if it
| could only be staffed by people who have actually held the
| jobs they're claiming to be educating you for. Nothing
| seems more absurd to me than paying someone thousands to
| prepare you for a job when that person themselves has never
| had a real job outside of the academia clique which is far
| removed from the real world.
| sjg007 wrote:
| It's because computer science isn't about programming...
| ant6n wrote:
| It's definitely not about memorizing, and it should be
| challenging.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| I'm pretty sure I missed some opportunities in the early part of
| my career because I took job requirements too seriously.
| tut-urut-utut wrote:
| Do people actually think the listed requirements are really
| requirements when applying for a job?
|
| I was always believing that list requirements are just a wish
| list, something that the company would like to have in ideal
| case, but even they don't expect they will find an actual perfect
| match.
|
| The more important thing when reading the job requirements is to
| figure out what is actually a core requirement that is important
| for the job, and what can be learned later, and just apply.
| uxp100 wrote:
| I mean, I believe Microsoft has a hard filter where you must
| fill fill out a questionnaire about the job requirements and if
| you don't answer yes to a question like "Do you have a masters
| degree" I don't believe any human ever sees it. At least they
| turn around the rejection in 24 hours.
| speeder wrote:
| I've been applying for jobs for some... years? now.
|
| I rarely apply to any position where I don't meet the mininum
| requeriments.
|
| Also I've seen vacancies with huge lists of requeriments,
| including exotic ones (like being an RPG player) and I meet
| them all, sent a resume, and didn't got invited to the
| interview...
|
| So I guess that indeed, the requeriments are bullshit.
| phaemon wrote:
| Your odds of getting an interview don't significantly improve
| after you meet just _50%_ of the requirements (40% if you 're
| female): https://talent.works/2018/11/27/the-science-of-the-
| job-searc...
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > Do people actually think the listed requirements are really
| requirements when applying for a job?
|
| I'm part of a mentoring group for college grads and junior
| engineers. It's common for software engineers to assume that
| there is a clueless (and/or evil) HR person reading these
| resumes and executing the requirements listing like computer
| code. if(education.level < MASTERS) then return E_UNQUALIFIED.
| Even if John Carmack is applying.
|
| A lot of them get advice from the internet or their parents
| that tends to be overly cynical and often dated. When we review
| resumes we often have to remove Microsoft Word and Excel from
| the qualifications section of programmer resumes because they
| heard from the internet or a parent that they'll be rejected by
| automated HR software without those keyword. I still see people
| trying to keyword stuff their resumes with 6pt white text at
| the bottom (don't do this)
|
| In practice, hiring is hard and successful companies understand
| that they can't afford to filter out qualified candidates over
| arbitrary low-signal missing requirements. I hope nobody really
| believes that Facebook HR people would reject John Carmack's
| resume because it didn't have a Master's degree. That's what
| Carmack himself is trying to explain. It should also be obvious
| that Carmack is the definition of an outlier in this scenario.
| scioto wrote:
| I've had to lobby to remove several minimum requirements from
| my company's job listings because, at most, they're a wish list
| of the perfect developer to walk in the door. And they never
| do.
|
| "And the candidate's name must be Carl because Carl just left,
| and PMs really got used to calling the Angular person Carl."
| asciimov wrote:
| You joke, but one place I worked had just fired another
| "asciimov" for the role i took. The first week I was there,
| they kept asking if I had another name they could call me as
| they didn't like the former guy and calling me by name,
| "asciimov", bothered them.
| rurounijones wrote:
| > Do people actually think the listed requirements are really
| requirements when applying for a job?
|
| When there are two lists in a job description named "minimum
| qualifications" and "preferred qualifications" I think a
| significant number of people would think _exactly_ that for the
| "minimum qualifications" list.
|
| Women appear to be much more affected by this which biases job
| descriptions with ridiculous requirements to men:
| https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-unless...
|
| Also see the comment by MS employee on the topic of "minimum
| requirements":
| https://twitter.com/colinmbrandt/status/1409577979731058699
| mechEpleb wrote:
| The most important thing is just to apply because unless you're
| connected, the job search process is much like a lottery.
| Filligree wrote:
| That's why they're _minimum_ requirements. To filter out people
| who have no chance of being hired.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| I would urge everyone to push back on your recruiters/hiring
| managers when they want to post requirements you and your team
| don't meet. It's harder to come up with the "real" requirements,
| but boy does it make you feel less scummy once you have.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| Could it be that minimum requirements like this select people who
| ignore superficial blockers? In my experience all the best
| programmers and IT professionals, are the ones that are able to
| identify when it's okay to break the rules. If you're so timid
| that you won't apply, maybe you're not the right person for the
| job.
|
| I suspect this holds true for most creative or intellectual jobs.
| musingsole wrote:
| If so, I have to believe it's a happy accident and not the HR
| people I've worked with somehow managing to play 4D developer-
| recruitment chess shortly after asking what's the difference
| between SQL and HTTP.
| [deleted]
| gameswithgo wrote:
| It is definitely bad that jobs often have illogical requirements
| posted. We should work to change that. Meanwhile, when applying
| for jobs, keep in mind that you need not totally fulfill all
| requirements even if it say you do!
| the_only_law wrote:
| Yeah, but when you're a household name, you probably get a little
| more slack than Joe Nobody
| EvilEy3 wrote:
| Let them circlejerk a bit, they think that if one thought of
| their idol aligns with their thoughts it means that it is
| correct.
| temp00345 wrote:
| It would be easier if they just addressed the 6 candidates in the
| world that fit these requirements by their names.
|
| Hey John, Jack, Matt, etc.. would you like to join us ?
| bogwog wrote:
| Maybe the person who wrote the requirements doesn't actually
| want people to apply so they can forward it to their buddy.
| gentleman11 wrote:
| Actually, John isn't invited. He's not elite enough
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Carmack does not have a Master's Degree, as listed in the minimum
| requirements. Other than that, he seems to greatly exceed every
| other requirement.
|
| Everyone should know that the requirements in job listings are
| almost always guidelines, not a strict checklist. Obviously
| someone with 3 years of programming experience won't be
| considered for this job, but someone who has 11 years of
| experience instead of the 12 listed in the requirements section
| should apply.
|
| Rule of thumb: If you can reasonably say that you're "close
| enough" to the listed requirements or you satisfy most but maybe
| not all of them, apply anyway. Let the company decide. Don't
| waste your time applying to jobs you're obviously not qualified
| for, but don't prematurely reject yourself from jobs if you're
| close enough.
|
| Hiring is hard. Finding candidates is hard. Contrary to some of
| the more cynical comments on HN, hiring managers aren't
| interested in rejecting otherwise qualified candidates due to
| small technicalities. That's what Carmack is trying to convey
| here.
| exporectomy wrote:
| Then don't call it minimum because it's a lie. All these secret
| code-language gatekeeping tricks in industry are awful. I'm
| happy to see one of the replies calls it sex discrimination. If
| that's what it takes to stop employers lying on job ads, good
| on them.
| shadilay wrote:
| It would be great if job ads were actually honest and gave a
| real minimum, maximum, and typical qualifications.
| ItsMonkk wrote:
| One of the minimum requirements that I have in a company is
| that their HR department understands the definition of the
| word minimum.
| aj3 wrote:
| Another cool idea is to list what are the proficiencies of
| existing team members.
| vsareto wrote:
| They should really just list the responsibilities and let
| people apply. Minimums and/or requirements are often not
| correct per the word definitions, but maximum and typical
| qualifications are probably fraught with even more
| ambiguity.
| shadilay wrote:
| Responsibilities is not a bad idea. Really anything that
| isn't as dishonest as it is now.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| > I'm happy to see one of the replies calls it sex
| discrimination.
|
| I'm not seeing this reply. In what sense is it
| discriminatory?
| lisper wrote:
| Because "advanced degree" is statistically a proxy for
| "white male".
| test_epsilon wrote:
| That doesn't make it discriminatory.
| motogpjimbo wrote:
| So is "STEM degree". Perhaps we should stop recruiting
| anyone with a STEM background?
| b9a2cab5 wrote:
| If you look at any graduate program in CS/Stats/Math
| today, you would think "PhD in CS" is a proxy for
| "Asian".
|
| Equality of opportunity doesn't result in equality of
| outcomes. Many of those Asian students have to climb
| countless immigration barriers and out-compete literally
| a billion people to come to the US. They arguably have
| _less_ opportunity than a white woman who's a US citizen.
|
| The idea that overstating requirements is somehow
| discriminatory is laughable. There is _nothing_ stopping
| women or whatever group is the oppressed group of the day
| from applying for a _job listing_. It's literally just
| submitting a resume, there's not even a big time
| investment associated with it. If there was
| discrimination in the resume screening that would be a
| different story, but you can't claim prima facie that
| having inflated job requirements is sexist.
| [deleted]
| XelNika wrote:
| I believe this is the reply in question:
|
| https://twitter.com/colinmbrandt/status/1409577979731058699
|
| See for example: https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-
| apply-for-jobs-unless...
| aroundtown wrote:
| > Everyone should know that the requirements in job listings
| are almost always guidelines
|
| In my experience job requirements are used to weed out and
| reject those that the hiring people don't like for reasons
| other than ability.
|
| This ranges from excluding women, being only inclusive of
| women, only hiring a certain races or religions, or justifying
| the use of work visas. I've even seen it used to justify not
| hiring someone because of their accent.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> Carmack does not have a Master's Degree, as listed in the
| minimum requirements. Other than that, he seems to greatly
| exceed every other requirement._
|
| Carmack doesn't have 8+ years of experience in Machine
| Learning, he's only been working on AI full time for about 3
| years.
|
| Carmack doesn't have substantial experience with "mobile
| graphics pipelines" or "graphics hardware and drivers on mobile
| platforms" - as Oculus, Quake and Doom were all PC-only.
|
| Carmack isn't a "Proven cross-functional partner, working
| across functions to drive solutions" because those are nonsense
| words that mean nothing.
| jobigoud wrote:
| I agree with the others but not the middle one, at Oculus he
| worked exclusively on the mobile variants, the GearVR and in-
| house prototypes. His entire mission was dedicated to mobile
| graphics pipelines and graphics hardware & drivers.
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| > Other than that, he seems to greatly exceed every other
| requirement.
|
| Even this one?
|
| "8+ years of experience in one or more of the following areas:
| machine learning, recommendation systems, pattern recognition,
| NLP, data mining, or artificial intelligence"
| VonGallifrey wrote:
| > Carmack does not have a Master's Degree, as listed in the
| minimum requirements. Other than that, he seems to greatly
| exceed every other requirement.
|
| In other words: Industry legend ALMOST makes minimum
| requirements.
|
| I know what you are saying, but it is absolutely crazy to me
| that they would post a job ad with Minimum Requirements even
| someone like Carmack doesn't have. Not to mention the
| "Preferred Requirements".
|
| Maybe they should make their Minimum Requirements more
| realistic or stop calling them minimum if they are not actually
| minimum requirements.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| > " _I know what you are saying, but it is absolutely crazy
| to me that they would post a job ad with Minimum Requirements
| even someone like Carmack doesn 't have._"
|
| Why? Carmack is an extreme outlier and it's likely that even
| among the people he knows that he would label as qualified
| for the position nearly all have at least a master's degree
| and the other requirements.
| VonGallifrey wrote:
| Where do you get the assumption from that Carmack knows
| people that fulfil these minimum requirements?
|
| I would bet he doesn't or at least thinks the minimum
| requirements are overkill, otherwise why would he make a
| remark like he did?
|
| The point is that when a legend like Carmack doesn't make
| the MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS maybe there is something wrong
| with the requirements.
| patrakov wrote:
| To add insult to the injury: he will probably not pass the
| Facebook coding interview. I tried (for a different position)
| and failed, due to a bullshit reason. It was a coding
| interview with two problems, 1-hour time limit, and an
| interviewer who watches how you enter code into their online
| editor without the possibility to run anything.
|
| The problems were not that hard, the real difficulty was due
| to the time limit.
|
| During my previous experience as a software developer I have
| acquired a habit to write an obviously-correct but non-
| optimized solution to every problem, to use as something to
| compare a better solution to, i.e. as a test factory. So, I
| had only enough time to solve the first problem correctly,
| and to implement a wasteful solution to the second one. In
| retrospect, implementing the "obviously correct" but wasteful
| solution would not have helped, because I could not compare
| the results anyway.
|
| In my opinion, the test selects for people who are lucky
| enough to discover and implement the non-obvious optimization
| correctly from the first attempt. Or, as I have discovered
| later, who have bought all books on programming interview
| preparation, because the problems were actually non-unique.
| lostcolony wrote:
| Yep. Leetcode style problems are effective filters only for
| people who grind leetcode. It's tailored for a very
| particular level of developer; someone who is smart enough
| to understand the problems and solutions (and retain them
| well enough to trot them out quickly), ambitious enough to
| put in that level of effort to work for a 'top tier' tech
| company, and sufficiently docile and willing to work on BS
| (outside of their working hours, typically, too) that
| they'll spend that kind of time just to try to make it into
| one.
|
| So someone who went out and built a SaaS business
| themselves, was moderately successful, and sold it? Not
| going to pass. Someone who spent three months grinding
| leetcode and doing little else? Probably going to pass.
|
| I'm guessing it's highly effective at selecting for the
| kind of candidates these companies want.
| goodpoint wrote:
| > I'm guessing it's highly effective at selecting for the
| kind of candidates these companies want.
|
| Why would a like a large company favors candidates that
| are willing to jump through hoops?
|
| Perhaps they are selecting for docile, dutiful, eager to
| please?
| lostcolony wrote:
| That was part of the implication I was very intentionally
| making, yes.
| htrp wrote:
| > I'm guessing it's highly effective at selecting for the
| kind of candidates these companies want.
|
| Bingo!!!
| [deleted]
| ar_lan wrote:
| > Everyone should know that the requirements in job listings
| are almost always guidelines, not a strict checklist.
|
| I don't think the onus should be on the people who are
| applying.
|
| There are a lot of people who are rule-followers, literal-
| minded, etc., and a lot of people with mental disabilities that
| might not be able to see through this checklist - of these
| candidates, a lot of them are likely fantastic SWEs. Why
| penalize people who are thoughtful about your posting? This
| just incentivizes lying both ways - it tells me that the
| company doesn't even believe their own requirements, so I may
| as well just apply anyway, even if it ends up completely
| wasting their time.
| Symmetry wrote:
| It's the easiest thing in the world to set up an Asshole Filter
| where you only get to interact with people who are willing to
| transgress the boundaries you set.
|
| https://siderea.livejournal.com/1230660.html
|
| Now, sophisticated consumers of minimum requirements will know
| that these aren't necessarily meant to be taken seriously and
| that ignoring them isn't _really_ transgressing boundaries. But
| that 's still filtering out a lot of people from different
| backgrounds, inexperienced people, and literal minded people.
| jasode wrote:
| The 2 minimum requirements that stand out because Carmack does
| not have a ML/AI mathematics background and he's a college
| dropout:
|
| >- 8+ years of experience in one or more of the following areas:
| machine learning, recommendation systems, pattern recognition,
| NLP, data mining, or artificial intelligence
|
| >- Master's degree in Computer Science, Mathematics or related
| technical field
|
| What was Carmack's development focus during Oculus? Was it
| building _artificial worlds_ for the headset such as video games
| or Augmented Reality of processing video input with ML /AI and
| enhancing it with tags etc?
|
| It's possible that Carmack's expert knowledge of graphics
| shaders/rendering is a different skillset than mathematics of
| Augmented Reality.
| nickjj wrote:
| > What was Carmack's development focus during Oculus?
|
| I'm not sure exactly but there's a bunch of keynotes from
| Carmack around Oculus Connect on YouTube. Here's one from 2014:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gn8m5d74fk8, and another one
| from a year later where he's live coding in a VR environment
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydyztGZnbNs. You'll find a
| bunch more if you search too.
|
| I remember skimming through them years ago not because I'm into
| VR development but I've been a life long fan of Carmack's work
| and like listening to him talk about things.
| elliekelly wrote:
| There used to be a time when "college dropout" was no big deal
| in the tech world so long as you could build things (see e.g.,
| Facebook founder & Oculus co-founder) so to see a _Masters_
| degree listed as a "minimum requirement" really bums me out.
| test_epsilon wrote:
| I have never remembered a time where "college dropout" was
| not a big deal in tech. It was such a significant thing that
| it was often one of the first few facts you would find out
| about a person behind some technology.
|
| And jobs with degrees as a requirement were often the norm.
| For a senior position in a research oriented group that might
| be expected to collaborate with and/or hire from academic
| groups, totally normal to want a higher degree.
|
| It has always been and is still the case that not having a
| degree is not a huge impediment if you have the chops -- You
| will find a place, or a place will find you. But it has never
| been the case that someone without a degree could ever expect
| to have equal opportunity to be hired into any job out there.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Lots of notable people in computing, and in particular game
| dev, do not have a college degree, yet it continues to be
| insisted upon by employers. My suspicion is that it is because
| it is an effective class filter. If you're high class enough it
| won't matter because you'll just network your way in.
| ozim wrote:
| But those notable people are the exception not the norm.
|
| Norm is that people go through college to learn about complex
| things in computing.
|
| That is why it is also norm to put it as a requirement in
| recruitment.
| whatever_dude wrote:
| Companies tend to put an emphasis on avoiding false
| positives, and usually don't care much about the risk of
| false negatives. They _know_ it 's possible for someone to be
| great without a degree, or any other random arbitrary
| requirement. But they know that there's a higher likelihood
| that someone without the requirement does not fit what
| they're looking for, so they're willing to lose desirable
| candidates as long as it removes a certain ratio of
| undesirable candidates.
|
| This is specially true of companies that get thousands of
| resume submissions, like Google, Facebook, etc. For them,
| removing the noise is a huge challenge.
| Zababa wrote:
| By definition, notable people are a minority. When you're
| recruiting John Carmack, you don't care about degrees because
| he's John Carmack. But most people are not, and for those,
| college degrees are considered some kind of safety net.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| I would say that while they may not be John Carmack, pretty
| much all of the best people I've met in this industry did
| not have a college degree, and many of the worst did.
| Anecdotal yes, but suffice it to say I put very little
| stock into paper.
|
| I myself attended university for a single year before
| deeming it completely not worth the time and money (which I
| couldn't really afford) and instead acquired several
| associates degrees (which I paid for with a menial job).
| Because of this, I admit to some bias on the matter.
| gentleman11 wrote:
| Up to half my graduating class drifted by with "help"
| from friends / could barely code. They eventually figured
| out that leetcode exists and now they all have high
| paying jobs
| username90 wrote:
| A good person with a degree likely works at Google or
| equivalent. If you don't work at such a place then likely
| the places you went to are just very non-degree friendly
| and therefore gathered a lot of good people without
| degrees that had a hard time getting jobs elsewhere.
| mkl95 wrote:
| Is this true? I remember reading a few years back that
| Google had plenty of engineers without a degree, that
| they allegedly hired based on their side projects, free
| software contributions, etc.
| fernandotakai wrote:
| >I myself attended university for a single year before
| deeming it completely not worth the time and money
|
| almost the same with me. i was already living by myself
| went i started to go to college. where i live, college is
| not a "full time job" -- i had to work all day long then
| attend classes at night. it was basically exhausting.
|
| i decided to quit college and instead focus on my career
| -- which was absolutely the right idea. i learned more by
| doing than by going to college.
| l33t2328 wrote:
| > i learned more by doing than by going to college.
|
| How could you know that without going to college?
| paxys wrote:
| That is an exaggeration. Most successful people in the
| software industry definitely have an engineering degree.
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| Within gamedev, I can't tell.
|
| > most successfull people in software industry
|
| - The outliers of the billionaires and big names are
| kinda making people reconsider though. e.g Zuckerberg,
| Gates (maybe dropout to do something is better signal)
| Zababa wrote:
| I remember reading somewhere that something important to
| keep in mind is that Zuckerberg and Gates didn't really
| "drop out" as they could go back to college at any time
| if they wanted to. However once they succeeded there was
| no need. This was not a choice between "a degree and a
| shot at something" but "a degree, or either something
| that works, or a degree later".
| paxys wrote:
| Yup, they "dropped out" not because they were failures
| but rather were too successful.
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| dropout doesn't mean expelled. If people took a leave of
| absence, they can return. At most schools, it is allowed.
| nindalf wrote:
| Makes it easier to apply for visas, if necessary. I might not
| use my Electronics Engineering degree in any way for work,
| but I would not be able to apply for a work permit without
| it. Maybe it's easier to write "degree" rather than "degree
| if you're a foreign-born person". The latter makes it seem
| like you're discriminating against foreign born applicants by
| having higher standards for them to clear. Which is true, you
| are discriminating, but only because the government says you
| must.
| [deleted]
| jahewson wrote:
| Sure if you compare the extreme end of one bell curve with
| the middle of another then, hey look the p95 people in one
| outperform the p50 of the other! But if you compare the
| median developer in each then what? My experience is that if
| you're > 40yrs old it's irrelevant as the industry was
| immature but younger than that and the median degreed
| engineer I'd expect to come out significantly on top.
|
| You also have the problem of survivorship bias - you're
| looking only at the non-degreed engineers who survived in the
| job and not all of those who dropped out. When hiring the
| question is whether the non-degreed pool of applicants can on
| average be expected to match the performance of the degreed
| applicants?
|
| Anecdotally < 40y/o great engineers I've encountered without
| degrees almost always have a degree in *something* or they
| spent their youth tinkering with personal computers -
| historically an even more inaccessible privilege than a
| college degree. They are p95 folks.
|
| I certainly don't think degrees have to be required but at
| the same time I don't want to wade through rivers of
| unqualified candidates searching for that p95 individual.
| Bootcamps are kinda the exception here but that's another
| topic.
| wyck wrote:
| It's not a class issue, at least in some Countries. People
| I've met in the industry who don't have a comp/eng degree are
| typically more entrepreneurial ( and really smart), the
| education system was slow and boring and VERY outdated, they
| felt more effective not wasting time. I've worked with some
| really bad programmers who had masters degrees, after 2
| decades I found that a degree really had no bearing on how
| effective someone was, it really came down to the actual
| person.
|
| The problem as someone noted is HR doing the vetting, HR is
| in most cases filled with administrators, not problem
| solvers. I don't have anything good to say about HR.
| ozim wrote:
| People are nagging about HR but did those nagging people
| done any recruitment on their own?
|
| It is not that you hire 1 person and you have all the time
| in the world to get to know him/her.
|
| There is limited time, limited information and hundreds of
| people to be hired with hundreds of applicants.
|
| Hiring is not scaling well, because it is time bound,
| someone has to read that CV, someone has to make calls. You
| have to have like 30mins - 1hr chat with applicant. Only
| way to optimize time is to throw away CVs which is not
| optimal because you might throw away good candidates.
| dzdt wrote:
| This is precisely because education is used as a filter so
| strongly. In order to make it into the industry without
| meeting the education requirement you must be truly
| impressive in other ways.
| kenjackson wrote:
| The way I phrase it for my min requirements is something like
| -- degree in comp sci, math, informatiks, or other
| engineering discipline, or similar engineering based work
| experience.
|
| Really just trying to capture a low-level baseline.
| nvarsj wrote:
| Would you hire an unlicensed electrician to wire your house?
| TingPing wrote:
| A degree is not a license and brings with it no safety
| regulations...
| pjmlp wrote:
| Depends on the country,
| https://www.ordemengenheiros.pt/en/about-us/
| randcraw wrote:
| No I would not. Home electrical wiring is becoming
| increasingly complex today, with the rise of whole-house
| surge suppressors, backup generators, solar panels, and
| sensitive expensive electronics everywhere.
|
| Assuming that half of the US houses were built before 1980
| (when electrics were still primitive and wiring was
| sometimes aluminum), fitting modern services into a home
| with knob and tube wiring and floating grounds (like mine)
| is NOT something I want to trust to a jackleg, no matter
| how many years of experience he has.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| I have hired someone to work on my home's electrical who
| did not have a license. A lot of people let unlicensed
| tradesmen, family members, or themselves do work on their
| home. Frankly, like programming, most of it isn't really
| that hard.
| fernandotakai wrote:
| the dude that does all the electrical stuff at my apartment
| does not have a license at all.
|
| but he does have almost 30y of experience. i would take the
| experience of the license.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| College degrees are a loaded concept in our minds; they are
| tied up with intelligence, knowledge, class, politics, etc.
| It's tough to untangle them.
|
| But education does help tremendously; smart people go to
| college, and work hard to learn for _four years_. I 'm not an
| idiot; I didn't waste my time; I learned _a lot_ ; it changed
| my thinking skills dramatically for the better. Especially
| for people in the liberal arts(!), what I see most is
| critical thinking: Being skeptical (about themselves too) and
| thinking powerfully and effectively and penetratingly. Look
| at all the nonsense that people believe on the Internet (and
| in business and elsewhere); we don't lack algorithms, we lack
| critical thinking. Also, college is very demanding on raw
| 'cognitive productivity' - inputting, analyzing, producing -
| more than business.
|
| (Tangentially, I see both critical thought and 'cognitive
| productivity' slide as people get further from college and in
| more powerful positions. The BS we hear from some middle-aged
| SV leaders is laughably megalomaniacal nonsense. Only their
| egos can save us, all we need is what they want to provide,
| if you listen to them.)
|
| But yes, people also use college as a class signal,
| unfortunately, and these days in the US college education
| correlates strongly with family wealth, IIRC the research. If
| we solve the latter, which we did easily in our history, we
| solve the former.
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| Yes, it's a class filter. You can't legally filter on race or
| sex, but most people with a master's degree are male and
| white so making that a requirement is a filter of sorts.
| test_epsilon wrote:
| You think companies and universities specifying a masters
| or PhD for certain job positions are secretly a white
| supremacist patriarchy of bourgeoisie, hell bent on
| filtering out the proletariat?
|
| Interesting conspiracy theory.
| hn8788 wrote:
| Most master's degrees, and degrees in general, are going to
| females, so if they're trying to filter for males then they
| aren't doing a good job.
| batty_alex wrote:
| >> are going to females
|
| Women, you mean Women.
| akarma wrote:
| Parent comment was responding to a comment that used the
| term "male." Responding with equivalent phrasing and
| saying "female" in that context makes a lot more sense.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Parent comment used "male" as an adjective and not as a
| noun.
| username90 wrote:
| No, female developers is an accurate term. There is
| nothing wrong with the word. You don't say women
| developers. And since it is fine in this scenario it is
| also fine in that scenario. You are creating a problem
| out of nothing here.
|
| Edit: Also woman is not inclusive, since it excludes
| kids. You wouldn't say that women toddlers. Using female
| and male are the only terms you can use when you are
| talking about the groups as a whole. Attacking people for
| using them just makes it impossible to correctly use the
| language.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| No one said "female developers" though. So while it's an
| accurate term, that's not an accurate quotation of any
| comment here.
| ask_b123 wrote:
| I mean... 'female' in "female developers" is an
| adjective, while it is a noun in "are going to females".
|
| Saying "are going to women" would be grammatically
| correct even if "women developers" isn't.
|
| Furthermore, most Master's degrees are not going to kids.
|
| I think it is probably fine to say "are going to
| females", but saying "are going to women" is not wrong
| and it probably sounds better.
| username90 wrote:
| Forcing people to add age qualifiers whenever they talk
| about gender seems insane though. And while it is
| uncommon for kids to get higher degrees it still happens.
| greydius wrote:
| I think the reason this word choice is divisive is that
| male/female refer to biological sex, whereas man/woman
| refer to gender roles. A large segment of society
| recognizes that gender is something people are free to
| choose.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Large segment? Could I get some source on that statement?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > are going to females
|
| Please, don't use "females" as a noun, that's
| gramatically incorrect and dehumanizing language (see e.g
| https://medium.com/fearless-she-wrote/woman-vs-
| female-67fd4c...).
|
| Additionally you're factually wrong, in STEM fields
| (which is what we are talking about) about twice as many
| degrees go to men:
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/828906/number-of-
| stem-de...
| l33t2328 wrote:
| The Person you replied to used "males" as a noun as well.
| I find it interesting you didn't have any words with
| respect to that.
| chefgoldbluum wrote:
| It is not surprising people react poorly to other people
| trying to police their natural language based on
| assumptions projected onto them about it.
|
| Male/female to describe individual or cohorts of humans
| based on sex is pretty common language. It certainly
| isn't "fundamentally" wrong. It's just a higher
| abstraction. You have to infer the form of being from the
| context - usually very easy.
|
| The rest of this article is just an author's assertions
| about how these words are used.
| bbarnett wrote:
| I guess it depends where you live. In Canada, more women
| have University degrees than men. It's been that way for a
| while.
|
| And outside the US, university can cost, but isn't a back
| breaker. Or it's free.
|
| I wonder how much this is a US problem. Most Canadian
| computing jobs, which I get sent, seem to specify "or
| experience" as an alternative to a degree.
| EvilEy3 wrote:
| Ahahaha. Ok buddy.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > My suspicion is that it is because it is an effective class
| filter.
|
| Not just that. College degrees are the perfect way for
| employers to outsource training (simply because an IT degree
| will transfer a lot of the knowledge needed on the job) and
| vetting (aka is this person able to meet deadlines with high
| quality output) cost and risk.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| I honestly don't think any part of that statement is
| correct. What I learned at university was a lot less
| practical and applicable than what I learned getting my
| associates, and I've met PhDs while teaching train-the-
| trainer courses who didn't know how to use a mouse. Between
| that and what I've heard from people who did get a degree
| in computing it is filled to the brim with math and theory
| and very little practical application. That's valuable, but
| it isn't the same as training.
|
| As far as vetting goes, my experience is that all it really
| vets is a person's familial wealth. Consistently I've seen
| that wealthy people have little trouble getting degrees and
| people from less wealthy backgrounds who get degrees had to
| work a lot harder for it. Things might be different
| somewhere like MIT, but most colleges are not MIT.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| On average, people with degrees are way better than people
| without degrees. The most competent people I have met are
| usually out of the best schools.
|
| Of course there are exceptions, and many people like to point
| them out and John Carmack is one of them. But really, someone
| who passed tests, spent a few years with a bunch of smart
| people, and took lessons, all that relevant to the work to be
| done has a high chance of being better at it than someone who
| did not do that.
|
| There are some really smart people who are not fit for
| school, it it not uncommon. But what is a very common is
| really dumb people that are not fit for school.
|
| Another common trope with successful college drop out is that
| they are usually entrepreneurs, certainly because as drop
| outs, they are better off doing that since it is harder for
| them to get hired. And then, you get into survivor bias. You
| only hear about the successful ones.
|
| So, companies hire people with degrees, because on average,
| people with degrees are better. Easier for them than having
| to go through thousands of inadequate candidates in order to
| find the exception. They may miss out, but for most
| positions, it is not that big a deal for companies.
|
| Degrees are a pretty good proxy for skill, not perfect, but I
| can't think of a better one right now for normal people. Of
| course, it doesn't apply for John Carmack. But when companies
| post mid-level job offerings, no John Carmack will answer the
| call.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| "On average, people with degrees are way better than people
| without degrees." says person with degree.
|
| I'm not convinced. By far, the thing I find correlates most
| with degree possession is familial wealth.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Yes, I have the equivalent of a masters degree, and my
| family is middle-class, but supportive and financially
| sound, which I think is fairly typical on HN.
|
| I also correlate skill with familial wealth, but more
| weakly than with degrees. It is clearly easier to learn
| some skill if you live comfortably. Not that long ago,
| many families couldn't afford a computer, try learning
| programming without a computer. If you are very
| motivated, you can do a lot, I have a lot of respect for
| those who do, but again, they are the exception, not the
| rule. I mean, the rich have personal tutors, the poor
| have local drug dealers, you do you think is more likely
| to end up the most qualified for a job in a reputable
| company? The worst part is that the rich may also end up
| better at finding drugs...
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| It's the signal-to-noise ratio.
| [deleted]
| akarma wrote:
| I think degrees are remaining a requirement because a hiring
| manager and recruiter at a large company are risk averse.
|
| There's an old saying: "Nobody ever got fired for buying
| IBM."
|
| It basically means that, if you use IBM for something and it
| doesn't work out, you can tell your manager "who could've
| guessed -- it's IBM!", and you'll be mostly off the hook. If
| you were to use some promising new startup, even if it's more
| likely to do a great job, the fault is squarely on you if it
| goes wrong.
|
| Similarly, when hiring an engineer, the recruiter and hiring
| manager can explain away a bad hire to upper management by
| saying "what a fluke, they have a degree from Harvard!",
| while they would be in a tougher situation if they made a bad
| hire and that person had no degree.
| specialist wrote:
| > _I think degrees are remaining a requirement because a
| hiring manager and recruiter at a large company are risk
| averse._
|
| My take is more judgmental:
|
| Our current hazing rituals persist because people can't
| imagine how it could be otherwise.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| I agree completely. We just can't imagine doing things
| differently.
|
| Fun anecdote: when I was 16 (with a couple years of
| experience as a developer) I was working for a company on
| some PHP codebase and they hired someone with a master's
| degree in computer science to work on it with me.
|
| 10 minutes after the first meeting he set his Skype
| status to "HELP: can anyone teach me PHP programming"
| htrp wrote:
| >I think degrees are remaining a requirement because a
| hiring manager and recruiter at a large company are risk
| averse.
|
| To be fair the "minimum requirements" are also a risk
| averse filter.... you can reject everyone without any issue
| by saying no one meets the minimum
| tester34 wrote:
| Maybe doing that 3 semester Master's ain't that mehh idea after
| all
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