My ex girlfriend is a pediatric cardiologist who recently passed her boards. When I talked to her about it, she was very much on the side that she wished she didn't have to study for it because it didn't have much to do with her job at all. She just wished she could spend her time getting better at the skills she actually used rather than a wide range of academic material that didn't matter to her day to day.

Her friends from residency thought similarly. That's just a few data points and maybe some doctors are helped, but it definitely isn't every doctor.

My third daughter was delivered by the anesthesiologist, because the ObGyn was stuck in traffic and the anesthesiologist was the only doctor on the floor. Doctors don't need that stuff outside their specialty... until the day they do.

If you pulled someone off the street, odds are that that person would also be able to successfully deliver your daughter.

How much did the anesthesiologist help, above that baseline?

He made an incision that was needed for a successful delivery. I don't want a random person off the street doing that, no.

Funny how humans were somehow able to reproduce just fine for millions of years before surgical deliveries.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YruT2ROEUc

Many women died giving birth.

Oddly enough, the US has the same pregnancy mortality rate as places like Latvia, Moldova, Romania, and the Ukraine. Tied for 56th out of 186 (there are lots of ties)

Similarly, I spoke to a pharmacist recently, and they said the same thing: the board exams expected the person to know information about medication that was no longer even in use.

> When I talked to her about it, she was very much on the side that she wished she didn't have to study for it because it didn't have much to do with her job at all.

I assume you're referring to your ex's exam to become Board Certified in her specialty, which, if you are, makes this statement incredibly hard to believe.

A specialty's Board exam is comprised of simulated cases from that specialty. Your ex wouldn't have to prep for geriatric internal medicine or stroke rehab in pm&r. Basically everything asked in the exam for board certification is related to one's specialty.

It is not a general exam like the STEP exams.

> just wished she could spend her time getting better at the skills she actually used

I can so relate to this when I look back at 4 years I spent studying for a CS degree. The first year had just 3 subjects out of 17 that had something to do with CS. The rest were wildly off the mark. Like engineering drawing, metal workshop, and what not. The second year was slightly better but just. It was crammed with electronics; and only from the 4th semester did things took a definitive turn towards CS topics. I'm sure the curriculum designers had a certain plan in mind but this was devised something like ~60 years ago, when engineering meant mostly civil engineering.

This was all 20 years ago, and I recently checked the syllabus out of curiosity, and no it's not changed one bit. One precious year of learning period down the drain.

Engineering drawing is character building though.

Is it that they need to create some objective barrier to entry?

Yes. It's a way to artificially limit supply, to prop up wages for people on the inside. It's common to most "licensed" professions.

I've wondered about this for forever. Thank you!

> "What the student thought was it temporary concession to the system-"I'll play along just enough so that I can get what I want from the system"-turns out to be the beginning of it forced, permanent adjustment to the system."

This is common to all professional disciplines.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B008GRDKPG

This is not appropriate behavior for HN.

There was no affiliate link in the original post.

ref= is not an affiliate tag, it's an Amazon ref tag.

tag= is an affiliate tag.

https://google.com/search?q=amazon+affiliate+code+url

https://medium.com/feedium/how-to-tell-if-a-link-is-an-amazo...

I checked before I posted and found two web sites that stated that ref= is an affiliate tag.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B008GRDKPG expands to https://www.amazon.com/Disciplined-Minds-Professionals-Soul-...

are you really claiming that "redir_mobile_desktop" or anything afterwards is an affiliate tag?

I made no such claim. Here is what I stated, so you can read it again: "I checked before I posted and found two web sites that stated that ref= is an affiliate tag."

You can choose to believe what I wrote, or not. But it's inappropriate to try to put words in my mouth.

Either way, I'm not interested in arguing with random griefers in the internet.

No unfortunately, didn't even see that when I pasted.

I tend to be on your side of the fence but I have to nitpick your argument:

At these companies, algorithms and the basics are fundamentally important. Because you tend to work on tiny parts of a massive whole, there is no tolerance for cowboy-coding and not following best-practices. IMO the interviews test that you can fall in line and follow the patterns that have been in place for decades.

With regards to using API design as something that is not assessed: System design questions do test this. Also at a company like FB, there's a handful of people designing APIs that are at the top of the pyramid, and even then long-standing conventions around API design at those companies will short-circuit the need for most devs to think about how to organize and name their endpoints.

At my small startup where most of us write an API endpoint, it's important to know. For a UI dev or someone optimizing DB lookups at massive software companies, API design is not something that needs to be tested.

Personally I can admit to feeling frustrated that passing these types of interviews is not my forte. It sucks that I would have to study for weeks to not flop these interviews even though I consider myself a good software engineer. But that doesn't 100% invalidate their interview process.

That all makes sense for hiring people to work on big existing systems, but many of these large companies are also trying to innovate and build new products with smaller, more agile teams.

Sure, you’ll still need to integrate with established APIs and focus more on scalability than you would at a startup, but the kind of people who excel in each type of role will have very different personalities and skillsets. Grading them on the same curve in interviews seems like a pretty bad idea.

> but the kind of people who excel in each type of role will have very different personalities and skillsets. Grading them on the same curve in interviews seems like a pretty bad idea.

I haven't interviewed for senior level positions with FANG. But aren't interviews usually different based on the job? I assume that interviews for job families like front end/backend/sre should all test different skills. And if you are interviewing with a specific team the manager can judge your background and interviews for fit with their team. The interview bar for algorithms is probably too high at some places, but those skills are relevant for all engineers.

> That all makes sense for hiring people to work on big existing systems, but many of these large companies are also trying to innovate and build new products with smaller, more agile teams.

Which innovation of Facebook are you describing? Instagram, WhatsApp, or the stories?

Not products in the typical sense, but these are some interesting technologies coming out of Facebook that I can list off the top of my head (many of which I have used personally):

* https://engineering.fb.com/2014/06/10/web/open-sourcing-haxl...

* https://osquery.io/

* https://rocksdb.org/

* https://fbinfer.com/

* https://flow.org/

* https://prepack.io/

You just listed a lot of tools where a deep knowledge of data structures is extremely important :)

Most of these things need to be created to scale and stabilize the existing system.

I mean you listed several database libraries, static analyzers, and a code optimizer.

Is it your suggestion that those kinds of applications do not require solid knowledge of a variety of different data structures and algorithms?

> I mean you listed several database libraries, static analyzers, and a code optimizer.

Correct.

> Is it your suggestion that those kinds of applications do not require solid knowledge of a variety of different data structures and algorithms?

No -- precisely opposite.

Your response confused me quite a lot, but after some thought, I think I've realized how things have become mixed up. I took this for sarcasm:

> Which innovation of Facebook are you describing? Instagram, WhatsApp, or the stories?

Why did I take that for sarcasm? Because it is apparent to me that Instagram, WhatsApp and stories are not innovative. So I thought the main point of the poster I was replying to was to take a dig at Facebook. I didn't realize that we were in agreement about the importance of data structures and algorithms, but then I also didn't realize that we were still on that topic: my intention was purely to refute the [what I believed to be the implied] notion that nothing innovative was happening at Facebook.

I listed the most innovative things that happened. They were product innovations that could have killed Facebook as a company, not RocksDB or React. At the same time I'm a software engineer, and I could write a database much easier than create something that grows faster than Facebook.

I use instagram and WhatsApp, no Facebook anymore (except messenger), as young people went there (and I'm following).

TikTok is a bit too much for me though, I think creating videos for it takes too much time, while for Instagram it's easy to take nice photos while I'm travelling.

Thanks for the clarification. We're in total agreement.

Overall I agree with your point, I just wanted to add that my experience with small startup vs FAANG is that it was the opposite experience for me.

Small startup involved wearing many hats, but in general was a more specialized role than FAANG.

FAANG was significantly more breadth than startup (and why I’d say it’s a great experience for beginners to gain a breadth of knowledge).

I could see how some teams are very specialized in FAANG however.

> At these companies, algorithms and the basics are fundamentally important. Because you tend to work on tiny parts of a massive whole, there is no tolerance for cowboy-coding and not following best-practices. IMO the interviews test that you can fall in line and follow the patterns that have been in place for decades.

... have they gotten a lot better since 2015?

https://www.darkcoding.net/software/facebooks-code-quality-p...

Is that true? I don’t know anything about medical licensing, but after having a few friends take the California bar exam, I’ve heard endless complaints about having to study things like divorce law in order to become a privacy advocate.

Law might be different. An anecdote my Dad (Lawyer) used to tell me.

> I went to school to learn the law. After school I had to teach myself how to be a lawyer.

Yes, the bar exam requires you to learn much law you'll never use. They are a general test that covers all areas of the law.

Boards are for specific specialties. You don't take a board to be a doctor, you take a board to be a podiatrist, etc.

Personally, I think both exams are about protectionism more than anything else.

Source: have taken a bar exam, have a wife that's a doctor.

It's the same in land surveying with the LPS licensing exams.

But in the case f doctors and lawyers, they pass it once, not every time they interview for a new job. Software doesn’t have licensing, so we do this bullshit every single time.

We would still do it if there was licensing. Doctors and lawyers still interview for jobs.

> We would still do it if there was licensing. Doctors and lawyers still interview for jobs.

People interview in most jobs, but people in licensed professions don’t generally have exams testing minimal professional competency in interviews because assurance of minimal professional competency is delegated to the appropriate professional licensing body, which implements entry exams, continuing education requirements, professional complaint/discipline processes, etc.

Minimal competency screening is abstracted out to a reusable, memoizing, component.

Medical boards are at the specialty level, so there is no equivalent. An OB is not going to have to answer primary care questions, for example. They'll all be very specialized.

Futhermore, you actually practice for several years prior to taking your boards, at which point you submit a representative subset of your cases from actual work, and a bunch of folks toward the end of their career grill you on them, then decide if you pass.

I agree with your comment. My wife took USMLE exams (all three steps) and she would complain to me that most of the stuff she memorize there, she'd forget them in a year or so (and eventually resort to Google and/or https://www.uptodate.com/home to refresh/review). :)

> The difference is that what the doctors put so much time into learning can actually be quite useful for their job.

I'd be curious to hear what a doctor would think about that. My intuition would be that, as for almost any exam, a lot of time is spent on things that will not be useful for any other purpose than the exam itself.

Even if it isn't, do doctors have to retake these exams multiple times (as developers have to do this for multiple interviews) every two years when wanting to switch jobs (doctors often don't have to switch jobs, they often have their own practice).

They also have to go to school for 10 years before they’re even allowed in the job market.

I’ll take our sometimes silly interview processes over that.

>They also have to go to school for 10 years before they’re even allowed in the job market.

Not to mention that during that time they are accruing loans in insane amounts (we are talking about $200-300k) and get worked in insane shifts (24-36 hour shifts are not unheard of during residency rotations).

Oh, and they don't get paid at all until they start residency rotations which is AFTER 4 years of med school, and their pay during residency is on the order of $30k-50k for what effectively amounts to 80-100 hours a week. Mind you, that's on top of the fact that in the US, you only enter a med school after you already got a college degree. So you enter a med school at the age of 23.

I have respect for the doctors, but I definitely do not envy their position. Their real work doesn't even start until their 30s, at which point they are already really deep in student loan debt. Of course it is manageable, since they get paid handsomely. But their work-life balance and the entire process where you start your "real work" after the age of 30 with $200-300k in loans, at that point, isn't something that a lot of people consider when they think "those doctors are having it nice."

It isn't even a second thought to me that I would much much rather study for interviews every single time i switch a job as a software engineer than deal with what doctors deal. And that's not even mentioning that studying for a typical software dev interview is absolutely nothing compared to the studying that med school students have to do in order to pass their board exams.

If there were poor doctors who had to drive for Uber eats after hours we would be hearing about it

I am not saying that doctors in the US are poor, quite the opposite.

They are, however, very poor (and in tons of debt) until they actually become a full doctor (which is typically in their early 30s, after they are done with med school, residency, and board exams) and extremely overworked (which still holds true for most of them even after becoming "real" doctors).

You don't hear about "poor doctors", because during the decade in which they are poor they are counted as "students" by most people, and poor students isn't exactly something surprising or eyebrow-raising for most people. It's just the magnitude of that poorness and overworking is completely invisible to most people who don't have someone in their friend group or family who just recently became a doctor.

In somewhat of a parallel, you don’t have to switch jobs either, you can start your own software company at any time ;)

I've tried doing freelance before, and I was a terrible marketer for myself. While that's definitely an option for people in this industry, I'm not sure it's a great path for me.

Same with medicine. Although under-served markets are common you still have to market yourself in private practice. New specialists advertise to GPs to get referrals for example.

Very good point.

I completely agree that being good at designing new APIs is one of the most valuable qualities of a programmer and I have never seen a job interview or test that could check this.

It's one of the questions I ask when I interview people.

I could care less whether you remember some algorithm you could look up in Knuth. I want to know if you can put yourself in your customer's place and design an API that meets their needs.

Language design is one of the hardest skills to master, and as the qualities of a good language include maintaining backward compatibility and longevity, most people who do master it never get to apply what they learned. Instead we only get to see their practice pieces. Their almost but not quite masterpieces.

It’s why I could immediately see that XML was going to fail in the long run. Everyone is a language designer? Sure, that’s going to work out.

APIs are tiny languages, so learning to do it well is a microcosm of language design. You don’t have to be good at all parts, but if the API you need isn’t in your wheelhouse, everyone will know. And if you build enough of them you’ll discover the limits of your skill.

I always wondered why every OSS software project done by / blessed by Google or FB ends up having a terrible API and developer experience (think Angular, React, Go, Tensorflow, Kubernetes), while delivering great functionality (heck, I used all of these and endured the pain for it).

I was going for people scratching their own itch during their OSS-at-work time and wanting to show off - but this could very well be a better explanation.

The content of the boards exam is actually quite comparable to the content of these interviews. They both cover general knowledge and fundamental concepts that very few working programmers or doctors will ever use, but absolutely should know.

Virtually every FANG interview I’ve done has covered API design as part of system design.

My brother is currently in med school, a huge chunk of his time studying is spent on rote memorization. Their Leetcode equivalent is Anki (flash cards) which they spend hours on every day, for years. At least with Leetcode, it’s taught me to quickly recognize algorithms and implement my own when needed.