Haha, the longer I stay in the software biz, the more I believe paula = "Brillant" to be a true story. The sad thing is, that there are tons of talented programmers out there who actually know what they are doing, getting rejected interview after interview because of "culture fit", while charlatans like paula BS and charm their way into job after job, trashing their projects and moving on to the next one as soon as their ruse is about to be uncovered.

Chalk it up to yet more evidence of how tech interviewing/hiring is utterly broken.

ive been paula in 2 jobs recently....unintentially. i specificaly asked if they wanted to give me a hard technical interview....both greatly objected including one who said they trusted me despite only having 1 year or programming experience....for a six figure senior lead roll.

Both seemed to really liked hiring odd canidates but were no slouches on coding.

Your comment is bullshit. Some of the best people I've worked with, both in and out of college, didn't even begin programming until taking their first CS course in college. No cheating or adderall involved.

You aren't doomed or damaged if you haven't programmed before hitting college. Claiming that is slandering a generation of engineers.

I'm criticizing a lot of CS programs, not programmers who didn't program before college. There are plenty of good programmers who never attended college for computers at all. My own mother started programming after majoring in English in college, learning in a training program at her job in her mid-20s (because she wanted to move out of a management track.) She went on to a 40 year career, and inspired me to become a programmer.

I can see why my comment could be seen as slandering all non-hobbyist programmers rather than programs that don't bother to teach programming because they expect you to already know when you arrive, but you would probably have to skip the second sentence of the first paragraph, and the first parenthetical in item 2).

Thanks for the rage, though.

Again, I watched people graduate who couldn't fizzbuzz. They got jobs, and they still couldn't fizzbuzz. These were friends, who I liked very much as people, and I'm as happy that they got good jobs as I am sure that anybody who hired them should be fired.

> but you would probably have to skip the second sentence of the first paragraph, and the first parenthetical in item 2

No, I think you're just poor at communicating. Your claim was "After the second semester, CS students divide into three groups", and then listed those three groups, zero of which involved a person who was new to programming doing well. You had every opportunity to hedge your statement, and you did not.

Because I intentionally excluded that category, under the qualification that I was talking about programs with a vertical learning curve, that also had intros to programming that didn't actually have lectures about programming. You clearly read those words, so the problem is either reading comprehension or being intentionally obtuse.

They're called "weeder" classes, and probably every CS department has them. You take your intro classes then they dump you into algorithms.

My colleague theorizes that many of the developers that we're interviewing with 12 years of experience actually have the same year of experience 12 times. That is, they move from job to job after 12 months and do the same stuff again and again without any kind of growth.

It's common with people that have only done green field work. They learn all sorts of cargo cult practices but aren't their long enough to learn their lesson.

People that have worked in brown fields are often selected out by recruiters because they think it's harder to build a system than to maintain one.