You are right. My statement was too simple. Experience is not enough. If someone spends 30 years doing the same thing without learning anything else they are not going to be a good hire for anything outside that box.
What matters is learning. That's what I look for. Does the person have a track record of constantly learning during the last ten years? What did they study? Did they try to get a handle on fundamentals? Did they stick to one thing, on domain, or did they learn and have experience in a range of domains? Did they enroll in any MOOC's? What were they? Can he or she speak about these topics with reasonable authority?
What I look for is an insight into who this person is as a professional. One of my typical questions is a short sequence: What are state machines? Give me an example of using a state machine? What's the difference between a Moore and Mealy state machine? Can you whiteboard examples of both?
I am not looking for the person to know the above with 100% accuracy and insight. I am trying to get to know the person and how they think. If, for example, they try to bullshit me, I learn something valuable. If, on the other hand, they say "look, I have never had to use state machines so I don't really know the subject but I understand they can be very powerful and useful and would love to have the opportunity to learn about them and apply the knowledge", well, that, to me, is far more valuable than them being able to parrot answers to my questions. Anyone can prep for an interview and ace it.
CS is an interesting field. When I started life as an EE designing and programming computers of my own design you used Assembler and maybe C and, if you were lucky, Forth. Virtually none of the things I do today existed when I went to school. And so comes the realization that, in my case, when it comes to CS, I am no different than a CS dropout. Virtually everything I do today I had to learn on my own. And that entailed a constant effort spanning thirty years that took me through CS theory, languages, frameworks, applications and new developments such as FPGA --which literally did not exist when I was in school.
Having navigated this journey I am forced to look at the person rather than the credentials. In fact, credentials very frequently lie about what the person is capable of. There are plenty of stories out there about major companies having trouble hiring recent grads because they don't know how to, well, do the work they need them to do.
Engineering in general is a domain that requires constant learning. Stagnate and you become irrelevant. CS can be particularly brutal in this domain.
So, no, it isn't about just experience but rather about what someone did during that time and what they chose to learn.
I went to college for almost two years, and re-enrolled in college late last year doing night classes. I also worked as a research scientist at New York University for around a year (2015-2016), though this was admittedly more in the working world than the educational world. My wife is doing college full-time. This seems like a weirdly dismissive response to me.
> For example, my son, who happens to be studying CS at a major university was forced to take a class on Marxism
I have never heard of this outside of stuff like the Drudge Report or Fox News; before I dropped out of Florida State University, I never saw Marxism as one of the required classes, and I changed my major from CompSci, to Physics, to Mathematics. Maybe your school is different, but I have seriously never heard of "Marxism" being a required class in any university.
> To continue with the example, if my son failed or dropped out of the Marxism class (he did not, he passed it with full marks) it should have no bearing on his overall standing in the CS degree.
Did you not actually read the comment you are responding to? I said pretty unambiguously that the classes that seem "useless" often end up informing your perspective in different ways. That was literally the whole point, and it seems like you kind of missed it.
To go with your example, it's entirely possible that the Marxism class would give a higher understanding of political theory and philosophy. While your son may not want to be a politician, him having a decent grasp of philosophical reasoning is probably a good thing.
>I also disagree with the concept of a fixed timescale being required in order to gain understanding of a topic. There's plenty of evidence in support of this. Companies complain that traditional CS grads don't know how to write code. Yet they spend four to six years in school getting BS or MS degrees. > Frankly, going back to my son, if it weren't for the fact that we work on a number of real-world projects together his coding skills based on schoolwork would likely be substandard. There's a difference between learning to CS to pass tests and applying it in real-world environments.
I'm sorry if I didn't make this clear, but no one should go to college thinking that it is sufficient for being a decent engineer, just like having a skeleton is insufficient for having a body, or having an oven is sufficient for having dinner. There is a lot of self-learning you have to do.
College is about building fundamentals, and teaching you how to teach yourself.
> I would much rather hire someone who devoted a couple of intense years learning and two years full time directly applying and honing the craft than someone who takes four years to study and comes to me with no experience other than, perhaps, a few summers as an intern here and there.
And I'm glad people have this mentality...it's kept me employed, but when I've had to hire people, a vast majority of dropouts who work on experience (though not all) have a weak understanding of fundamentals, and while that's not a problem for some domains, it is a problem for mine.