As an aside, what is the range for "low six figures?" I hear this term a lot, and it seems ambiguous to me. If I hear "low 90's" I can reasonably assume between 90-93, but what does low six figures mean? Is it 100k-103k as an analogue to the 90's example? Or is 100k-300k? If the former, than it's probably most useful just to say 100k. If the latter, then that range is too wide to mean anything.

I agree with you that as a term “low six figures” is odd. 300k should mean low six figures.

In the vernacular, with regards to salary, it is used to describe a range between 100 and 200k. So low six figures tends to mean closer to 100k. That’s very consistent in usage.

It is a little odd though, I would agree about that.

Right but she is licensed, this is the main issue.

Indeed. If it was illegal to work as a programmer without a Master’s degree in Computer Science with a GPA above 3.0 the interview process would not look like the current one.

The industry wouldn't look the same, either: it wouldn't be nearly as profitable or widespread as it has become, and nobody but CS academics would care about it.

And it would be much better, we would stop having pseudo-"engineers".

Quite, we should also eliminate nurses. The minimum qualification to work in healthcare should be a medical degree, just like we shouldn’t allow any car that’s worse in an accident than a Tesla on the road.

Most European countries require a 4 year degree for nurses, where the first two years are kind of shared with medical degree.

Kind of shared?

Nursing

https://www.ucc.ie/en/ck710/

Medicine

https://www.ucc.ie/en/ck701/

There is not one single shared course between the two degrees. If you can find a course shared between medical and nursing students in all of Europe I'd be surprised.

Portugal, Spain and Greece as the examples I know.

Nursing is taught at many universities with medical degree, first and second year students tend to share some of the lectures.

Also, because of that, people with nursing degree are able to acquire a medical degree by taking the extra lectures and exams afterwards.

Could you furnish me an example from Western Europe please then? I am familiar enough with the Romance languages to read Portuguese or Spanish if there’s a university with any/substantial overlap between nursing and medicine.

What usually happens is that nursery faculties sometimes share a few lectures with medicine faculties, for things like biochemistry, biophysics.

It is not examples that one finds online, rather on corridors and schedule notes.

What I can provide as an example is that nurses and doctors have equal access to many master and PhDs. Check "condições de acesso" in some of the links from the page and you will find "enfermagem" as accepted degree.

http://www.uc.pt/fmuc/gabineteestudoavancados/formacaoposgra...

AFAIK, most or all US schools have required a 4 year degree for a long time now.

On the other hand, perhaps the quality of code would go up?

I've been through an acquisition or two in my day (on the acquiring side). I'd echo knicholes' comment about that and go further: in my experience code quality and degree credential don't seem to have any relationship.

I've seen too many projects created by people with higher degrees to bet on that.

After personally seeing two large, recent acquisitions, I can attest that code quality != business value.

All you need to do is to enforce functional programming everywhere and only CS academics would stay ;-)

The industry is different, that is another issue. Programmers do not deal with just the small variations of the mostly the same code base (human body) which broke down (got ill) for some reason, but most bugs have pretty well documented symptoms and prescriptions how to fix them.

> hiring in tech is BROKEN. Other industries do it better.

Can you explain how other industries do it better and come up with a better, plausible, non-fantastical way to interview programmers? I'd love to know how to interview people "better", but it still has to be something where I can later present evidence that my decision is based on, in some kind of report. It would have to allow multiple people at my company to interact with a candidate in a half day or less. Copying what another industry does would be great, if it worked, because it'd help convince people it was a good method to try out.

> Are the hoops you have to jump through justifiable for how "important" your job is?

I never thought a 1 hour phone screen and a few hours onsite was particularly onerous, and based on how much the job pays, it seems well worth it.

> People's lives are dependent on how well she does her job.

I'm not sure why you seem to think that saving lives correlates with strictness of interviewing, especially with the 2 jobs being so drastically different.

Hiring in tech is not broken. Hiring for a moving target (the tech business changes very quickly) with sub-par recruiting staff is difficult at best.