I work for a Japanese companies, and more than half of the developers here have non-IT backgrounds like marketing, sales, design etc... All of them started with scala from zero and 2~3 years later they start talking about monad, final tagless or writing concurrency helper libraries... Our brain is quite malleable so having non IT background doesn't prevent you to be a good developer.

>I recently heard they are now considering to move their code base from svn to git, and write some test code to stabilize the firmware that goes into the ssd products.

>I don't think I can explain in short how a mediocre developer who never actually coded something into reality got a degree, and got a job in allegedly the biggest company in south korea... All I can say it is a complex korean thing that requires some cultural understanding of our society.

Are you sure it's a Korean thing, and not just a hardware-company thing? Even in the west, hardware companies are notorious for having terrible software development practices / UX. Perhaps the sole exception is Apple, and this has allowed them to dominate (compare iOS to the crapware OEMs like Samsung bundle with phones).

It's Korean (probably also Japanese) thing. My friend attended their interview, said there were little to no technical questions, but he has been asked to create "self-presentation". He was hired. Samsung produces tons of software quite far from near-hardware level, for example Java and C++ applications for their own version of Android.

I think the jury is still out whether asking technical questions (Is that code for whiteboard interviews?) is really a good idea. Seems Samsungs interview process is just different (probably also bad. All interviewing seems to be bad).

Do apple hire CS majors who never did a project in any language? Probably not..

Are you saying that in Korea one can be a CS major and have never done a single SW project in any language? Sorry, I find that hard to believe.

One of my friend didn't submit his project for Operating System course, still got an A-. He doesn't know anything about seg fault handling or process scheduling. How did he get an A-? Because companies are looking for good GPAs rather than what actually the candidate knows. Students complain if they get low grades because it may screw up his career. Since universities are competing for hire rate after graduation (unemployment is serious in south korea) they press professors to give them good grades as possible.

In a mediocre university you learn how to run a VMware virtual machine in OS class and that's it.

Intel sure does - and they're more of a hardware company than Apple is...

However, probably their candidates have to show some projects with electronics and FPGA. Again, Intel has lots of "pure software" development, for example their own compiler, profiler, debugger and rest of similar tools, bundled into IDE.

So, basically the company hired complete junior, was willing to train him and somehow that is bad thing as big companies should hire only already learned people?

What I read between the lines here is that the company hired someone with no experience and gave them more responsibility than they should have at the beginning of their careers.

I feel like this is somehow related to parasite.

None of the characters was incapable. All of them were good at what they were hired to - driver, housekeeper, tutor, art tutor. They were also hardworking at their jobs. The rich dude was also good in his job (and caring to his family) and worst you can say about rich mom is that she was naive.

I dont think you understood the movie.

I’m also extremely confused by the parent comment... why was him not knowing C++ relevant? He had a CS degree so he’s surely at least somewhat qualified.

Some people think you need to have experience in that exact language or framework to be hireable. I would not expect that especially among fresh graduates, but that is me.

They don't ask technical questions or anything related to CS...

If he didn't know how to write C++ but has a CS degree then presumably he knows another language like java. Many language features are interchangeable so it sets you up for picking up a new language fairly quickly

This is the exact history of Tetsuya Iida, Sony programmer responsible for PS2 software compatibility layer.

"I had no real electrical engineering skills to speak of whatsoever and I didn’t even know how to boot up Windows 3.1, let alone how to write any programs. Even now, I can’t help but wonder what people at Sony saw in me when they decided to hire me. Luckily, I got the chance to learn how to program computers thanks to a training program that the company ran. "

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22501566 https://medium.com/@freelansations/the-story-of-the-ps2s-bac...

TLDR: this seems to be standard Asian hiring practice.

At least, It's very common in Japan.