News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework. Parent comment

Re:The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid home... by _o_ on Friday April 20, 2018 @02:05AM (#16882490)
... and that is wrong with the software development today. Our generations of developers started with playing games, using computer, reinstalling, configuring computers, then we started to mess with computers, os, hardware, network, routers, programing came in somewhere in the middle (we wanted to make a game, demo scene, ), cleaning malware, then we started automating the computer tasks, learned multiple programing languages with a clear vision - "I want to learn C, coz then I can do anything" :D, switches multiple computers, security started to become an issue (winnuke (tm) :D), riding the irc splits, taking over irc channels for fun, started to study networks at low level, got first data loss, learned to rescue data, switching controllers on hard disk, studying prolog as it was hilarious, got first job, ... when we started to develop commercial software we had accumulated decade of knowledge from multiple platforms and OSs (I have wrote my first program in simons basic on c64 at age of 11, put together my first 386 from components). We have tinkered with anything coming under our hands, software development was just another skill and we use our knowledge from IT in development and vice versa.

Today? At 20... "what will I be doing for a living? Hm, I did some html and copy pasted js, I WILL BE A DEVELOPER and be RICH". Went to college, learned to develop. But I don't have any foundation, web and sql is all I know, and I am sleeping with Programming patterns book under my pillow and looking at latest programming hype (silently laughing at year of nosql databases and year of blockchain, now AI, and eagerly waiting for the next silver bullet that will solve ALL our problems :D)

IT is not a different field, but the level of today knowledge IS, also the attitude.

A friend of mine is having a successful software company and he said to me once: "If I get a guy with the attitude and background we had, I will hire him even if I wont be hiring at that moment. They became so rare, that it is worth having him on a bench, just to be there when you need him".

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid home... by Clubber on Friday April 20, 2018 @07:36AM (#16883921)
>web and sql is all I know

Honestly, people who actually know sql enough to build a decent table design are super rare these days.

As far as everything else, you're pretty spot on.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid home... by magic_beans on Friday April 20, 2018 @03:06AM (#16882720)
Hop off your high horse, gatekeeper.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid home... by _o_ on Friday April 20, 2018 @03:17AM (#16882769)
Why, I have a good view from here :) And I can take great photos of scenery, now I do understand what the photos are showing is not something that everyone would love but still, those are photos, you can shoot the one making them but the scenery is not going to change by that, or we would just shoot all war journalists and there would be no more wars.

But joke aside, what is the issue, do you disagree?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid home... by retbull on Friday April 20, 2018 @11:49AM (#16885775)
I started on other peoples computers personally. I poked around and played with linux and some networking and when I went to school for it I realized that it was too late to learn it from the ground up. If you are still trying to figure out how a driver is written in C then you aren't up to date on any current programming paradigm. While I get that 20 years ago you needed to care exactly how memory was handled to properly optimize your code, now I am writing data processing jobs that take 10-15 TB of memory spread across 30 computers. If I fuck up 1 MB of ram per computer it really doesn't matter and it is way more efficient to just add another machine rather than pay me for two months of work to fiddle it down to perfect.

The scales I work at are more about Big O than anything. If I make a mistake that is N^2 vs Log N then I wait a week for a job to finish verses 1 hour. That is an issue. If I add on 10 min because I inefficiently use swap space it doesn't matter. I need to pay attention to the higher abstraction rather than the minute details. Sure I can fix a computer but if I do that rather than stopping a job from doing puts across regions it will cost the company 12000 dollars for each hour I am removing malware.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid home... by andai on Friday April 20, 2018 @07:52AM (#16884004)
I would argue that demand has increased dramatically, but the supply of natural-born developers (eg. those tinkering since childhood, not just following the money) has not.
[ Parent | on HN ]