From what I know from doctors, what FANG does is basically the equivalent of doing your board exams every time you want to change jobs. Which usually gets a reaction of dread & disgust when you couch it in those terms to doctors.

Interviews are significantly easier as far as prep time goes for doctors & psychologists.

BUT, you don't have to go through the entire med school & residency rigamarole as a software engineer either, so as far as total effort goes FANG is probably easier. I posit that software engineering is probably the most egalitarian method of socioeconomic mobility, because the only real barrier is time, a laptop, the internet and motivation, while all the other methods require an upper-middle class background and expensive schooling (law, medicine, finance) or just plain luck (business, celebrity art & sports)

But being an interviewer in FANG, I've actually found it rare to find the self taught type in practice. But we do leave that door open unlike medicine.

> I posit that software engineering is probably the most egalitarian method of socioeconomic mobility, because the only real barrier is time, a laptop, the internet and motivation, while all the other methods require an upper-middle class background and expensive schooling (law, medicine, finance) or just plain luck (business, celebrity art & sports)

As much as we all hate the tech interview process, it's a relatively level playing field as far as hiring goes. It's not perfect, of course, but we have to select on something.

As engineers we have a level of free access to study tools and material that my friends in other professions envy.

The alternative to skills testing is to rely more on credentials, references, and background. People who come from elite universities or lucked into prestigious jobs early in their career tend to prefer this type of interview process because it benefits them the most while excluding those who are trying to break into the industry.

The benefit of skills-based testing, however imperfect, is that it opens the door for people who have skills but not the right background or credentials to skip through the ranks and get a foot in the door.

> it's a relatively level playing field as far as hiring goes

I am not sure that is true at all. People with family or basically any commitments outside of work don't have anywhere near as much time to practice for this sort of thing and why should they need to practice for an interview? You do the job every day, if that isn't enough then the interview is clearly testing for the wrong thing.

>People with family or basically any commitments outside of work don't have anywhere near as much time to practice for this sort of thing and why should they need to practice for an interview?

I've done this rodeo in my thirties and forties, complete with a very busy existing job, family, long commute, etc. The bottom line is that the time investment wasn't terribly large as it was more refreshing than learning things from scratch.

Putting the 20 hours in over a couple weeks for a 2x raise felt like a worthwhile expenditure of my free time, and worth prioritizing over some of my every day commitments.

Relative to going to med school, law school, or a top 10 business school, I can’t see how it’s not true even for those with families or commitments.

You go to med school or law school generally before you have had children. After you've done those things, you don't study for weeks leading up to an interview. Instead, you have a piece of paper that proves what you know and the interviews are more a decision of "do we want to work together" rather than "is this personal qualified".

I see, so among the audience which has been prescreened, life is good. I can see that being nice, if you're in that class of people.

However as someone without a CS degree who is nonetheless able to get jobs as a software engineer because there isn't a process of credentialing, I am glad much of the industry works the way it does.

> From what I know from doctors, what FANG does is basically the equivalent of doing your board exams every time you want to change jobs. Which usually gets a reaction of dread & disgust when you couch it in those terms to doctors.

If Software Engineers want to get rid of algorithmic interviews, all they have to do is come up with a professional exam and a strict licensing body... just like most professions carrying a tittle (MD, Lawyers...).

But as long as "3 months js bootcamp grad" can advertise himself as a software engineer just as much as a guy from Stanford CS then we'll keep having these interviews.

> But as long as "3 months js bootcamp grad" can advertise himself as a software engineer just as much as a guy from Stanford CS then we'll keep having these interviews.

The fact that a bootcamp grad can compete for the same software engineering jobs as a Stanford CS grad is one of the very best parts of the hiring process in our industry. Are you proposing that we start using credentials as gatekeeping?

We need a compromise where proven, experienced engineers can stop having to go through everyone's homebrewed technical interview and new candidates still have a shot if they don't have that credential yet. It should be up to companies to decide if they want to use those credentials, and I suspect companies would switch if it maintained a good reputation because why bother with a job that requires a technical interview?

I prefer homebrewed technical interviews. They can be customized to the needs of the company hiring and can reflect day to day work better.

Treating engineering as an undifferentiated commodity measured by leetcode performance is partly why this charade exists.

Neither leetcode nor homebrewed are what we want anyway. But homebrewed is IMO worse because it could be a weird format and people have issues with surprises during technical interviews, least of all anxiety. And when there's a bunch of different flavors and formats, candidates either prepare for them all or accept that they won't do well at some formats and forgo those jobs.

IME candidates are spooked way more by leetcode than homebrewed tests that mimic the job they do every day.

I'd estimate (from browsing graduate boards) it's probably among the top 5 most hated aspects of the industry. #1 for many - because it's so anxiety inducing.

Your experience must be different than mine then, which, it's a large field so it's totally possible. Dunno, it'd be great to not have to repeat any kind of technical test, regardless of the format preferred.

I agree it's great.

But it has this side effect that you need to test every candidates.

> Are you proposing that we start using credentials as gatekeeping?

No. As a fast-track sure. So you don't have to start every interview with a FizzBuzz [0].

[0] https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/

Ironically, that article was written in a era where there weren't really boot camps, only CS Grads from actual universities, and in that article it specifically calls out many CS grads cannot code.

The filter is usually a 15 minute test, while later you have multiple-hour interviews, sometimes even whole day in the office just doing interviews. So you're not even getting that much, unless you somehow fear failing the first test, while being confident in the multi-hour interview skills?

This is absolutely the worst thing about hiring in our industry. The reason interviews are so abusive is that there is no way to effectively filter candidates. There's no reason to say a four year degree is the requirement, mostly because such a degree does not predict ability very well. But on the other hand, it is possible to design a credentialing system that would be effective. If we, as an industry, want self taught people to be able to get jobs we can design the system so that it the credential is obtainable by someone who is self taught. Personally, I'd like to see a system that combines testing, a practical exam, and then a further credential that you can get after you have some work experience.

This is how we become doctors. And we don't have the excuse that a swashbuckling frontend dev could literally kill people.

> The fact that a bootcamp grad can compete for the same software engineering jobs as a Stanford CS grad is one of the very best parts of the hiring process in our industry. Are you proposing that we start using credentials as gatekeeping?

But we already do use credentials as gatekeeping. There's a lot of talk about bootcamps and whatnot, but how many of these people actually get passed the resume screen when compared to a Stanford CS grad? FAANGs famously recruit from same 20 universities, and then complain about "lowering the bar" if they branch out anywhere else.

We could stop gatekeeping, but it still happens.

I have been doing this for 20 years. I used to be good at algorithmic challenges 20 years ago straight out of university - because that is a ,lot of what we did.

I have these I have used "challenging" algorithmic stuff a handful of times in my careerer. Same with recursion, I have used it, but not too many times.

If I do hackerrank or leetcode or something similar these days, it's pretty much luck if I will get it. If I sat down long enough I could work it out, but with a 2 hour time limit, its usually 50/50 whether the answer appears in my head in that time frame.

And here's the thing. I write a lot better code than I used to. I know what is important, and it isn't clever algorithms, it's choosing the right abstraction, and keeping things maintainable. Making the code easy for the next developer to follow. For the vast majority of software roles out there this will be so much more valuable than algorithmic knowledge. Sure knowledge of computer science fundamentals is important, but I think we give it too much emphasis over what really counts.

Basically these are testing for a computer scientist when the job is for a software engineer.

Fundamentally, they are using algorithms and problem solving as a proxy for IQ, because IQ tests are a minefield in the US.

It would be interesting to look at the correlations between the two, as I'm not sure if that's every been done.

> But we already do use credentials as gatekeeping. There's a lot of talk about bootcamps and whatnot, but how many of these people actually get passed the resume screen when compared to a Stanford CS grad?

At some point there's a signal to noise ratio issue here as well.

That's gatekeeping logic.

Most every company I know would love to exploit any high-conversion, high-quality pocket of candidates.

If companies are passing on specific pockets, it’s likely from a belief that the conversion from top of funnel to successful hire is low.

Companies don’t examine their efforts. They copy off of each other. How many processes are simply aped with the excuse, “Well, BigCo does this, so it must be right”?

There’s plenty of excuses for gatekeeping, but the real reason is laziness. Of course, we don’t call it that, we call it a meritocracy and apply our biases as “common knowledge”, “proven”, or if we’re feeling particularly full of ourselves, a “sufficient statistic”, but never what it is: a bias, a blanket assumption, a gate.

As soon as you’re relying on assumptions, it’s not a meritocracy. It’s bias promotion, ie gatekeeping.

That's also why there is so much shit software out these. Small companies saving money initially by using inexperienced developers. Then once it is making money they need to hire a load of seniors to clean up the mess. (Though plenty of seniors are capable of overengineering a mess as well)

Another way of reading your statement: That's also why there is SO MUCH shit software out there.

If small companies weren't able to use inexperienced developers to spin up half-assed MVPs, we'd be at the mercy of whatever large companies are interested in developing, and time has shown that as companies get bigger, they lose interest in niches in favor of products that will be massive successes.

You're not wrong, but I also don't think the world you are describing is a problem.

> If small companies weren't able to use inexperienced developers to spin up half-assed MVPs, we'd be at the mercy of whatever large companies are interested in developing

That's an interesting perspective. I would say there is some truth in it, but a lot of small companies get plenty of investment money.

But then you just ignored the whole micro-ISV market which is cranking out tons of software solving interesting problems. And investment money has its own issues. VCs view their companies as a portfolio, they are only interested in ideas that have the potential to be huge. There are plenty of software products that should exist but are not interesting to investors because they are not potential unicorns, but interesting to smaller software shops since that revenue will provide a nice living for them.

Yea, but I also think it's more complicated than that. I would think that if you already work for a FAANG or other well-respected tech company, that would de facto serve as your "professional certification" and help avoid these ridiculous interview processes. If you work at Google as a SWE, then you've already passed a pretty high bar to become a SWE and when you apply somewhere else, ideally they would see you can pass that bar and not ask you to leetcode your way over the bar again. But IME, that's not the case. I know some FAANGs that, even when doing an internal transfer within the company, still require you to go through the full leetcode interview process.

There seems to be some kind of inherent or cultural distrust amongst tech interviewing, where nobody trusts that anyone has tech skills unless they personally verify it. I don't think a professional exam/certification would solve this distrust.

Back in the day I remember stories about candidates who would get an offer from Amazon and then Google/MS would just automatically counter-offer without interviewing as it was assumed that if they passed the Amazon interview then it was good enough for Google/MS.

Or maybe that was just an urban legend...

> you've already passed a pretty high bar to become a SWE

The problem with the algorithm/leetcode style is that you can run it at a very high bar and you end up selecting people extremely skilled at that one thing, but which has very little to none correlation with shipping reliable & maintainable production code.

I've never needed to hire (and surely never will) people who can reverse binary trees with a hand tied behind their back, so that style of interview is not a meaningful signal.

> "I would think that if you already work for a FAANG or other well-respected tech company, that would de facto serve as your "professional certification" and help avoid these ridiculous interview processes"

Nope, not at all. Despite their rigorous hiring process, even the FAANGs have bad hires, burn outs, or people who simply can't keep up with the pace. Some FAANGs require an interview loop even for internal transfers to guard against a bad hire.

I highly doubt there are even a few software firms who would offer you a job sight unseen purely because you have a prestigious company on your resume. It might help you get your resume to the top of the stack but you’ll still unfortunately be leetcode grinding and whiteboard hazing.

The IEEE has taken the first step toward professional software engineer licensing with the "Software Engineering Body of Knowledge" and associated certification program. So any company that wants to could accept that certification as a substitute for their own algorithmic interviews. (I am not necessarily recommending that, just pointing out that the option exists.)

https://www.computer.org/education/bodies-of-knowledge/softw...

https://www.computer.org/product/education/professional-soft...

My colleague just left after doing a load of AWS exams. I am left to fix his mess. He will create another over engineered over complex mess. He values clever over maintainable. I am not sure exams are the answer, but I don't have a better suggestion.

Except they existed before a boot camp was a thing and were about evaluating whether CS grads could write real code.

>If Software Engineers want to get rid of algorithmic interviews, all they have to do is come up with a professional exam and a strict licensing body... just like most professions carrying a tittle (MD, Lawyers...).

By the time the exam is designed - not complete, designed - it will be obsolete. By the time the exam is completed, there will be 3 new languages invented.

This would be like changing what animal you have to study as a doctor every six months for the test.

Definitely not. The vast majority of computer science and software engineering practice needed for successful product delivery was developed back in the 50s to the 70s and has not substantially changed since.

The library and framework of the week is not fundamental experience.

I always advocate computer science training really needs more history of the discipline. So many new languages and libraries turn out to be a rediscovery of ideas thoroughly explored in decades prior, just that the creator didn't know.

An orthopedic surgeon gets new types of tools and implants in their toolbox through their career, but the structure of the bones they operate on is the same forever. It's the same with software.

A new grad from Stanford is no more an Engineer that someone from a boot camp is.

Fwiw, Triplebyte has a fast track program which allows candidates to do a 2 hour proctored pairing session. Companies can use that as a way to filter and take over at least part of their hiring process - it’s a one and done thing for a candidate dealing with any companies through the platform. We’re currently experimenting with it.

It would be nice to have something like this completely divorced from a recruiting engine though.

Screw companies trying to make money by using developer time for free.

I’m genuinely confused by this comment and any downvotes. No candidate is doing unpaid work for us or for this service (ie. building out their platform). It's a way to validate a skillset, pure and simple, and that's how this platform makes its money. The output from a candidate has no business value aside from this.

I can understand distaste about having a time imbalance (ie. a candidate is not investing the same # of ours as our staff), but like I said, this is a one and done thing and can be used w/ a way to cut down time working with any other companies using the platform.

For us it means going directly to the final rounds, whether they took it at our suggestion, for another company, or just did it for themselves. If they do it for us and they don't end up with an offer, they are not left empty-handed from the process.

In sum, it moves toward some sort of accreditation system, that’s the reason I mentioned it. It's a shame my comment is at the bottom of the pile as I too would love a future where the only time spent interviewing is just a couple hours getting to know my future teammates, and I truly feel platforms like this may eventually get us there.

All the same I'd appreciate feedback on why they're disliked. I've seen them mentioned in other HN threads without any vitriol.

Ok, so why not pay devs for their time? Because you prefer to use that time as profit, no?

The system encourages the default distrust of developers resumes. That most of them out there are lying, and we need a test to be sure that they can actually code. How many people have actually hired the mythical devloper that can talk well in an interview and not code?

ONE MORE TIME - NO ONE IS PROFITING FROM INTERVIEW OUTPUT - THIS IS TO ASSESS ABILITY AND ONLY THAT. Forward, backward, sideways, up and down.

If you're doing work that benefits the company that is another matter, but that's not what's happening here (or anywhere I've ever worked) and is ethically dubious regardless. That's not the point of an interview. I can't believe I'm having to explain this.

You don't pay a dev for their time during the interview process for the same reason no one pays anyone for their time to interview in any industry.

To hire straight off a resume is beyond wild. I'm in the process of hiring a dozen developers for my team, and have had 3 people who had great resumes fail a basic pairing session - they couldn't code. In the 24 years I've been in this industry, probably had at least a few dozen encounters like this. Sure, 90% of the time this isn't true, but it's true enough that it's insane to do it.

"How many people have actually hired the mythical devloper that can talk well in an interview and not code?" I actually have. Twice. Earlier in my career when I believed these sorts of things. And was on hook for cleaning up the mess. Never again. The harm to the team's morale is not worth it.

For what it's worth, I worked with a talented self-taught engineer. He stated he hit a ceiling and needed to get a degree and so he did through a remote learning program. In the event that this is common, it may explain why they're rare. The resumes of the ones that don't hit that ceiling probably don't make it to your desk.

I don't know if there's a ceiling for degree-less software engineers in the Bay Area. Speaking as someone who dropped out of college and is now a "senior" software engineer at Google, I've worked with a couple folks who are much more senior than I am without a degree.

That said, it's much harder to get your foot in the door without a degree, even in the Bay Area. I had to go above-and-beyond to get my first job at a small startup (I created a program that used their API and was useful enough that I ended up continuing the work when they hired me). With my second job at Dropbox, the recruiter told me that they only reason they interviewed me was because I went to Recurse Center (which is a free programming retreat for programmers that also acts as a recruiting firm). Multiple companies have grilled me during interviews about why I dropped out, including Google.

As a college dropout myself, this really makes me think about continuing my degree. What did you answer to Google and others who grilled you?

It seems kind of strange that you would go to university to progress. I feel the opposite, university was a good starting block but the vast majority of my knowledge is from on the job.

I think they meant a salary ceiling.

That makes more sense.

While I won't accuse any one person of this exact opinion, I do enjoy that the gestalt of HN appears to believe that for this upper-middle class job from which you'll have the power to easily destroy millions of dollars' worth of value if you screw up hard enough, you should not have to 1. solve problems in front of someone in an interview 2. bring your laptop to your interview 3. have to provide any evidence of your programming ability via open source samples or past work 4. have a take-home work problem 5. be hired to do the job on a trial basis for a period of time 6. put up with the fact that the interviewer has power if for no other reason than you are one of multiple candidates 7. essentially prove your ability to do the job in any manner whatsoever.

I can understand the arguments for many of those, but... uh... somehow you're going to need to prove yourself. We can't just throw everyone who shows up into the position to see how they'd do... and the HN gestalt would presumably complain about how awful that is, too.

>somehow you're going to need to prove yourself

You could just, like, ask me! Talk to me like a human being. You'll quickly see I'm all the things I claim to be on my resume. /s

once you start drilling down into the details of things they claimed that they worked on its usually pretty clear if they are BSing or not

Used to play this game where we'd ask the interviewer to "go deeper" on how something worked to see where there limits of their technical understanding was. Depending on the level expected (eg junior vs senior) you could expect certain depth.

Eg: "Tell me what happens when you type an address into your browser bar"

Someone junior might say "You type in the address, it fetches HTML from their server, and your browser shows it" -- "go deeper" -- "Their server uses HTTP or something.." etc..

Someone senior might get to something like "Well when you press the first 'w' key it triggers a hardware interrupt ..." or more likely something about TCP/IP and the rest of the network stack...

I don't expect to ever have either the chance or the true desire to do this, but I've often wondered if I could, with literally zero additional preparation, spend a full 8 hour day presenting an answer to that question extemporaneously. If I couldn't, I'm not off by much at this point.

yea this must be a pretty standard networking question, when i am probing network skills i ask "what happens when you type ping google.com"

you get a very interesting range of answers

> somehow you're going to need to prove yourself

A doctor can do a whole lot more damage than the vast majority of software engineers, and yet doctors don't have to start this proving process from the ground up every job change.

A fair point. I would suggest that doctor's decade-long post-high-school educations are much, much more directly connected to what they are doing than a 4-year bachelor's in computer science is to a programming job. A doctor comes out of an internship in which they were actually doing the job for an extended period of time under heavy supervision. If software engineering adopted the same procedures, we could probably also get away without these interview procedures.

My experience with consulting jobs is that while the interviews themselves are still difficult, they do not require nearly as much of this "devote your life to studying and taking practice tests" that the tech industry is enamored with. Consulting interviews are almost all behavioral, and sometimes require a short case presentation, but even the case rarely requires days and days worth of preparation. Yes, there are some who do prepare endlessly (like "Cracking the Case Interview"), but I know far fewer people who go that route and even those that do still spend only a fraction of the time on it compared to leetcoders.

The mindset during consulting recruiting seems to be more of "we want to make sure you have a decent base level of knowledge and problem solving skills, but if you don't know how to code/make a PPT/whatever, that's fine, because we can teach you that stuff". Big tech recruiting seems to be the opposite: even when big tech companies claim "you don't need to know everything, because we'll teach you", they still require you to jump through these leetcode-style hoops to prove your skills.

And this is echoed beyond the hiring process too, in my experience. Consulting companies hire smart people and want to keep them for a long time, so they invest a lot of money into training those people and attempting to keep attrition down. FAANG on the other hand seems to care less about attrition (sometimes even embracing it, eg Amazon) and wants to hire people that require minimal training, and thus wants people that have immediately demonstrable knowledge so they can be immediately productive.

Top management consulting firms (McKinsey, BCG, ec) are insanely competitive and won't consider anyone without elite credentials, i.e. top grads from elite undergraduate programs, MBAs from top schools, Ph.Ds from good research programs, etc. These opportunities are far more scarce and require more effort overall as well. I suspect that some of these firms could hire more or less randomly from those who make it to the interview stage and do nearly as well, since their resume filtering is extremely rigorous, while their skill requirements for most roles aren't that high outside of being smart, analytical and willing to travel and work insane hours. Big Tech is substantially more egalitarian in terms of who they let through to the interview stage, while the actual job demands somewhat esoteric skills that go beyond just being a smart, analytical hard-working person, which necessitates a more meaningful filter.

I suppose Big Tech could do something similar (skip leetcode stuff for people who have credentials such as prior experience at top tech firms and/or tangible research experience at top research institutions) but I suspect that would not go over well with most people that have issues with the current hiring processes.

I keep hearing this but in my country iẗ́s just not true. Yes you needed to go to the right school (most difficult part but not difficult) an maintain a 3.5 (what they advertised) or even a 3.0 GPA (what they ended up accepting) and join a few student clubs (which nobody really cared about).

Maybe the bar is higher in the US.

Are you talking about US-based top global management consulting firms and actual strategy/management consultant roles (since top consulting firms often do other things like technology, tax/accounting, etc)? I guess that's possible but I suspect that in that case, it's largely because roles in these offices aren't quite desirable from a comp or a career track perspective. The reason why management consulting is hard to get into is because it pays well and it promises a career track where you can get to a 7-figure income and potentially go directly into the upper management of F500 companies afterwards without working your way from the bottom. If that's not a realistic path from a satellite office (I have no idea if it is or not), then it wouldn't have the same draw. If it is though, I mean it has to be competitive, right?

Yes, management consulting at the local offices of the "big 4". Starting comp in MC something like 60k/yr (whereas IB is double).

More high end opportunities than other career paths certainly, but it's much less top heavy. 7 figure income, a few CEOs make it but not common.

Kind of make sense though if local offices adopt some of the same rhetoric and marketing (elite selectivity etc) as the US head offices but with really different market conditions.

> Top management consulting firms (McKinsey, BCG, ec) are insanely competitive and won't consider anyone without elite credentials

That’s why they are failing. Broken hiring processes. Big Tech is eating their fruits.

>My experience with consulting jobs is that while the interviews themselves are still difficult, they do not require nearly as much of this "devote your life to studying and taking practice tests" that the tech industry is enamored with.

What type of consulting are you talking about, and are these jobs really paying >$250k? What would someone have to do to get a shot at one of these jobs?

My partner is a lawyer and I am a software developer. We've both been in these fields for about a decade.

The key difference between our professional experiences is that the legal profession is self-regulating, whereas software devs/qa/pms are totally socially atomized.

Lawyers have their own organizations, which give them some independence from their clients. Society accepts that this is desirable for the maintenance of the legal order.

Software occupations should move in this direction, for the good of practitioners (wages, working conditions, fairness in promotions and hiring) and the wider society (complement to government regulation around security, privacy, fairness in hiring and promotion).

The bar association defines the examination that lawyers must pass to practice. Employer/client interviews focus more on "culture fit" and familiarity with specific practice areas than on certifying basic competence. The bar also administers "continuing education" to ensure that a lawyer who passed the bar decades ago isn't totally out of the loop on recent developments.

I would love to see the software sector move toward this kind of self-regulation through unionization. We have the power, we just need to coordinate.

Instead of a high-stakes and all-too-often arbitrary interview every single time you want to change jobs, you could prove your basic competence to practice through an exam, and elect to fulfill your continuing education requirements however makes sense for you, within a framework decided upon by workers themselves.

Such a system would not be perfect. No set of examinations is ever going to perfectly capture ever-shifting real world requirements, for example. But we can hardly do worse that the sector is doing now.

We have to stop letting recruiters (i.e. middlemen) and employers (i.e. counter-parties in the employment relation) dictate terms to software workers arbitrarily. The wider society should support tech worker organization in unions because these organizations would provide a check on executive and investor power. Without such checks and balances, we can only expect more of the same short-term thinking and ethical corner cutting.

I have a lot of troubling squaring your statement

> Instead of a high-stakes and all-too-often arbitrary interview every single time you want to change jobs, you could prove your basic competence to practice through an exam, and elect to fulfill your continuing education requirements however makes sense for you, within a framework decided upon by workers themselves.

with how the barriers to medicine/law actually work. A single Amazon interview is not particularly high-stakes - if you bomb it you have a dozen+ companies that can offer similiar comp, and you can always re-interview after a year.

If you bomb the LSAT, or the MCAT, or STEP 1, you will effectively be branded for life. All your future applications to school/residency will include this information. How is emulating that going to get us closer to your stated goals?

> If you bomb the LSAT, or the MCAT, or STEP 1, you will effectively be branded for life.

I don't think this is true. I've heard anecdotally of people bombing the LSAT/MCAT, retaking, and entering elite universities.

But in any case, the analogy is not with exams to _enter_ post-secondary school training, but with exams to certify vocational skills _after_ such training and/or real world experience (e.g the bar exam, the F.E./P.E. in engineering, "masterpiece" evaluations in the skilled trades).

Private enterprises like TripleByte/codility try to perform a certification function of the kind I want to see workers handle through their unions. In fact, it might make sense for a union to simply contract with TripleByte/leetcode/codility to implement examinations. TripleByte has no real incentive to make its examinations a single-shot affair. Why would a worker controlled equivalent have such an incentive? There might even be a perverse incentive to encourage people to take the exam multiple times (as, for instance, the College Board does) that would have to be guarded against.

> exams to certify vocational skills _after_ such training and/or real world experience (e.g the bar exam, the F.E./P.E. in engineering, "masterpiece" evaluations in the skilled trades).

I think what needs to be considered with this is three things:

1. Tiered credentialing & scope of credentials

2. On-boarding / grand-parenting those who are already practicing

3. Studies on what interviewing in non-software related technical fields looks like. I see lots of anecdotes (probably data now) on what software interviewing is like, but mech / civil / elec, actuary, etc. interviewing isn’t something I’ve seen discussed as openly.

I hope I’m not misrepresenting or coming across as negative here or in what follows.

- - -

1. The F.E. and P.E. exams seem to be aimed at people with engineering degrees, so it’s the interaction of both education and practical experience being certified.

For the F.E. exams from [1], “It is designed for recent graduates and students who are close to finishing an undergraduate engineering degree from an EAC/ABET-accredited program.”

For the P.E. exam from [2], “It is designed for engineers who have gained a minimum of four years’ post-college work experience in their chosen engineering discipline.”

Even after passing those exams, there is still annual education and training requirements to maintain certification. Yes, it’s not nearly as rigorous as whiteboard coding that people are currently subjected to, but it’s not a one time activity either.

In both cases there is emphasis on college.

I’m Canadian and it’s pretty similar for P.Eng. There are some exceptions, but they do require a college education.

This leads to tiered credentialing in the Canadian system. There are:

- technicians (1 year education) - technologists (2 years of education) - engineers (4+ years of education)

There is a defined scope of work for each of these professionals. To move up the tier requires education, exams, and apprenticeship. To switch between specialties, I’m not sure if it’s possible.

Not everyone in the engineering profession needs to be an engineer. It is entirely okay to have tiers. However, tiers become very restrictive and could be perceived as gatekeeping, among other things.

2. I think there will have to be a dividing line of some sort to keep those who have valuable experience without an CS education in the field.

Something like: All people who can prove work experience and practical experience are under this one assessment and credentialing method. All others after follow a different credential evaluation method. Or the tiers allow math, physics, self-taught, etc. to be credentialed as such.

3. Technologist interview anecdote. When I was interviewing as a manufacturing engineering technologist the assessment has been:

- read a shop drawing and tell me what these symbols mean

- jump on a computer and start producing a 3D model in the software used by the company. Produce a 2d shop drawing from that model

- explain how you would come up with an inspection plan to show the product has been manufactured correctly

- solve statistics problems. Set up a control chart. Interpret what the points mean and explain the next steps. Design an experiment. Tell me the hypotheses, tell me how you would calculate sample size, how do you know that’s a good sample size?

- go on the shop floor be handed an inspection sheet and inspection tools. Check if this part conforms to standard

- whiteboard ladder logic for PLC

- handed some print outs of CNC code and asked to explain what the lines meant

Those are technical questions I’ve been asked in a series of interviews for manufacturing technologist jobs. It’s not one 8 hour day of interviews like some tech companies. It’s usually 2-3 sessions x 2-4 hours each session. That line of technical questioning is not a substitute for education. It’s on top of having education and certification in the field.

My point is I don’t think software is unique in asking technical questions. I just think it’s not as widely publicized in other fields.

[1] https://ncees.org/engineering/fe/

[2] https://ncees.org/engineering/pe/

The problem with this approach is that it creates serious barriers to entry.

I'm an immigrant who finished a pure-math PhD and went into software engineering afterwards by building up a portfolio and leetcoding in my spare time. With your system there is no chance I could have done that. Passing all of the exams would not have been possible without a strictly CS education, and I couldn't have studied for the exams after my PhD finished because my visa status at the time was tied to being actively employed.

So many people nowadays are becoming productive software engineers from slightly unconventional backgrounds (pure math, physics, boot camps) and this would stop immediately if CS certification became part of the job requirements.

I did not mean to imply that a CS degree would be necessary for all work in software. I would oppose such a system as obviously irrational and serving only a subset of incumbents. With your background, you would if anything have found it much easier to enter the field, as you would have known exactly what to study for and, once certified, had more bargaining power with specific employers.

Barriers to entry exist today, and will always exist in some form. The question is who gets to define them. I am arguing that the workers themselves should have more of a say than they do at present.

One union certification could literally be passing some randomly selected leetcode problems. Ideally, there would be a variety of certifications to reflect the variety of niches in software (someone doing TLA+ for embedded applications shouldn't need to know anything about web app architecture, necessarily).

The difference is that you wouldn't have to do it for every new employer, and workers would have more say in defining the body of knowledge considered relevant.

I don't think anyone would advocate for university credentials to be a hard requirement. I personally have no relevant university credentials except some math courses from a community college.

That said, I think it would be fine for someone to submit a transcript from a CS degree to be certified for basic algorithms knowledge in lieu of sitting an exam on that topic.

Depending on how it's implemented, it could actually work to the benefit of non-degree holders. A certification reflecting your ability to leetcode and a review of your portfolio, could put you in the same place as graduates of elite CS degree programs.

Do physicians have to perform surgery to demonstrate their knowledge when they change hospitals?

Do executives have to demonstrate their knowledge of acquisitions or something similar?

Also let’s not act like this only applies to FAANG. Every dev job from internships and 50k entry level positions and up require the same testing. How many 70k/year jobs require testing every time you change positions outside of tech? Very few. Law, some medical fields, and a few other highly skilled fields do require licensing, but you only do that once per state at most.

Tech is the only field I’ve ever seen where your experience doesn’t matter and you have to prove your skills with every interview. In other industries, it’s mostly about personality.

In other industries, it’s mostly about credentials. The reason a surgeon doesn’t have to prove themselves when they switch hospitals is because a medical degree means something. Getting a medical degree is brutal. The failure rate for exams is very high (60+% for specialist exams). The whole process is effective at weeding out anyone who won’t be able to do the job.

In comparison, software has no equivalent credentials. Universities, collages and bootcamps have no incentive to fail anyone. As a result plenty of weak students pass - only to discover that they’re largely unemployable. This does a disservice to lots of people - companies can’t trust degrees, and need expensive interviews. Good candidates have no way to reliably demonstrate their strengths. And weak students waste tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars and years of their lives failing to learn to code.

But the benefit of our system is that we allow programmers to be self taught. If you can’t afford to go to collage, or you are from a poor country, or you just don’t like school, that’s no barrier. You can learn programming in your own time and still get a great job. There’s lots of great programmers with the aptitude to become lawyers or doctors - but who would never be able to get the piece of paper they need to get those jobs. That’s something we as an industry should be proud of.

I'd prefer credentials, honestly. Something like the bar for law (but with no specific academic requirements - a test anyone can take) would be useful. If whiteboarding works, that can be done once and become an accreditation. Repeating the process with every job application makes it harder to change jobs, because you either have to do serious prep before a slew of interviews or keep those interview-specific skills up. It also makes the minimum time to get a new position very high.

> I'd prefer credentials, honestly.

Most well-credentialed people would.

Most under-credentialed people are thankful for skills-based testing because it levels the playing field.

I'd say I'm under-credentialed. I don't have a CS degree.

I'd like a way to prove my skills once, rather than with every interview I have. I bet CS grads would as well. The interview process is just so... tedious. And in a field where you get significantly more money by changing jobs, that's a problem.

It's a market inefficiency imo - people get stuck in jobs where they aren't paid enough for at least some amount of time. People can't hire new employees quickly because the process takes forever. I've been on both sides of the interview process many times and it's extremely inefficient on both sides. We're developers... this should be streamlined and automated.

Not only that, but isn't law a field where the quality of the jobs you can get is dependent on the prestige of the school you went to? I.e. you wont ever get a job at a top firm with a law degree from University of State

>Do physicians have to perform surgery to demonstrate their knowledge when they change hospitals?

Not sure how serious you're being but the answer is yes, surgeons seeking to change from hospital A to hospital B have interviews where a surgeon from hospital B will visit hospital A to supervise a surgery or other operation. Depending on how critical the position it may even be a partner from one hospital doing the supervision. In fact nowadays the supervision can be done remotely.

Furthermore surgeons are required to maintain their accreditation by earning credits on a yearly basis through continuing education and/or training and they do so on their own time.

These guys don't mess around and if you think surgeons get hired because of their wonderful personality then you sorely underestimate the medical profession (and overestimate their personality ;P ). It's incredibly competitive, demanding, and prestigious in almost every sense imaginable.

This really just highlights the difference between the artificial coding interview via some web based half-assed IDE, and being watched coding on the job.

The comparison would be more direct if the surgeon was asked to operate on a dummy using a kitchen knife in front of the interviewer.

Then there's the problem that there's no way in hell a software company is going to let another company watch their employee work on proprietary code.

And the surgeon doesn't know what surgery they are going to be asked to do or why.

> Do physicians have to perform surgery to demonstrate their knowledge when they change hospitals?

And even that wouldn't be comparable, since they'd be observed on something they actually do every day as part of their real job.

In software the interview drills are about thing nobody ever does as part of the real job, so one won't have any recent experience doing algorithm tricks.

> Do physicians have to perform surgery to demonstrate their knowledge when they change hospitals?

Most surgical procedures are mostly the same regardless of which hospital they're performed at. It's not like software engineering where the tasks and difficulty vary greatly from company to company.

A surgeon's record at one hospital is their interview for the next job. So yes, every surgery they perform is, in essence, contributing to their interview for any future jobs.

So is most coding. Dig though shitty code until you work out what is causing a bug. Make a two line change. Commit. Push

> Tech is the only field I’ve ever seen where your experience doesn’t matter and you have to prove your skills with every interview. In other industries, it’s mostly about personality.

This sounds like a good thing to me (for tech). The interview process may suck, but at least everybody has to endure it. And then you're in a meritocracy. That's the theory, anyway.

From what I’ve been told instead of an obnoxious interview process, they require expensive credentials and are siloed by the prestige of their schools.

I sure don’t think leetcode interviews are great, but I’ll take it compared to that.

I've got two doctors in my family, and from how they describe it getting into med school is easier than FAANG. Once you're in you're practically guaranteed 250k after 7 years of training and 500k debt. Residency definitely sounds like a pain in the ass, but if you graduate from a reputable American med school it's very unlikely that you don't match. I guess it depends on how you define easy. Some may define it as amount of work required, I tend to think as chance of success.

> Some may define it as amount of work required, I tend to think as chance of success.

I don't understand how anyone can think that 7 or more years of med school and grueling residency is somehow easier than studying Leetcode for a few weeks or months.

Med school has a very different selection bias than FAANG interviews. No one seriously attempts to attend medical school unless they've committed to 7 years of grueling training. A FAANG interview, on the other hand, is barely a blip on the radar over the course of an engineering career. A lot of people apply to FAANG jobs just to try their chances at the application process. Not so for medical school.

> I don't understand how anyone can think that 7 or more years of med school and grueling residency is somehow easier than studying Leetcode for a few weeks or months.

It's obviously easier if done only once.

But doctors go through education & residency once and then start their careers.

Software engineers need to repeat this every job change for no reason.

Getting into any US med school is definitely harder than getting into FAANG. [0]

Part of it is things like the MCAT and organic chemistry are hard, part of it is there's a whole "hidden" component of med school applications related to volunteering, shadowing, research etc, that is opaque to most. This is part of the reason 50% of med school students already have a parent working in medicine.

[0] https://www.aamc.org/system/files/2020-10/2020_FACTS_Table_A...

I'm not sure what the table proves without FAANG statistics. I don't think 65% of students with a 3.8 are getting accepted at FAANG.

> I guess it depends on how you define easy. Some may define it as amount of work required, I tend to think as chance of success.

I'm not sure if the chances of success are any higher for getting into a medical school in the US. As a one-shot thing, a FAANG interview loop may be tougher, but there are a lot of big tech companies and you can keep trying your luck. I think Amazon alone has like 50K software engineers, they churn engineers like crazy and the hiring bar isn't quite as high as some of the others. Whereas if your undergraduate credentials aren't good enough or you simply don't do well on standardized exams, you're kind of out of luck in terms of getting into a US medical school. I could be overestimating the difficulty of getting into the least competitive medical school in the US, but my understanding is that they are all pretty difficult, leading many people to go to a medical school in the Caribbean.

Applying to FAANG isn't a one-shot thing. At most of them, you can re-interview every 6 months to a 1 year until you get the job or give up.

I think that's exactly what I said? This contrasts with the medical school where I guess in theory you could reapply, but large parts of your application are going to remain the same.

Doctors and lawyers certainly have a much easier hiring process, from all the ones I know. And in both fields experience is respected, the opposite of software development.

Doctors in particular (with residency) and lawers to a lesser degree (bar exams) have a more difficult path into the profession. But they don't have to prep and go through the bar exam for every single interview after that.

It would be unthinkable to make an established surgeon balance chemical reaction equations or something obscure like that from their undergrad days as part of the interview! But that's what software engineers must deal with.

Doctors have an easier hiring process because they have a licensing board.

Getting that license is significantly harder, though

People who are on the IB side of IB, who are making way more than 250k/year, were just born into the right social set and got hired by their dad's pals from Yale. Easier, much easier, but requires more luck.

What does IB stand for? Probably not internet banking? :)

Probably investment banking.

The process is quite a lot easier for the hire and the outcomes are frequently better for employer. A key point is that it is a much more substantial process than it is in tech, and the qualitative aspects are understood/accepted/managed.

Tech hires quickly and frequently for the short-term. The algorithms test approach is intended to condense what would be a much more expansive investigation into something straightforward (and supposedly quantifiable.) This discards a significant amount of information which is considered in other high-end jobs.

You’re right, the way that other jobs that pay as much hire is far more biased to people of the right social class who have been trained into the correct expectations of how one is supposed to act. Tech’s hiring process is more open to people without that kind of experience.

From what I have seen outside of tech a lot of these 250k+ jobs go by track record, references and being able to talk well. You definitely don’t have to study and practice for weeks or months.

It is not as easy as passing a test. Rounds of interviews, hiring hiring committee approvals to follow.

Plenty of easier process exist but they are not jobs you can apply for. A baseball special assistant hired by an owner can be hired after drinks.

In terms of regular jobs a sales staff working on commission could be easier.

This isn’t a serious question if you consider that the people who struggle with them have spent their time optimizing for delivering real value and the problems don’t demonstrate or even provide entry from that.

"You're a surgeon, you say? Go operate on that patient, and if they live, we'll CONSIDER you for the job..."

When you consider the risk involved, no.

Exactly. I don't like going through these interviews, nobody does, but there does seem a lack of perspective in how this issue gets discussed.

You can really leave a lot of money on the table with this attitude of "oh well, I dodged a bullet, if the interview was hard then the job is probably bad and the whole company too."

"I cannot afford to waste my time making money." - Louis Agassiz

I'm not quite there, but if I leave money on the table to avoid a place that treats people in an abusive way, I'm okay with that. I don't need the extra money that badly - it's too expensive.

I’m confused - are you saying you find the programming interview process abusive? In what way is it abusive?

"We expect you to study for months, on your own time, unpaid, so that our interviewing process can throw questions at you that are unrelated to the actual job we're hiring you for. Because we can, and because we do it that way, and because we don't care about how it comes down on you." Yes, I find that abusive.

There’s a trope in kids cartoons, where everyday objects becoming scary looming nightmare things at night time. We can play that game with anything! Cars: “a 2 ton metal box we hurl through space in a life ending daily slalom”. Careers: “underhanded slavery - don’t work and you don’t eat. We make you choose your poison so you’re complicit in crafting the chains around your ankles”. Children: “Biologically enforced obligations which destroy the best years of your life...”. The fact that we can tell scary stories doesn’t make the stories true.

With interviews - my claim is this: A well designed interview has a high statistical correlation between passing the interview and being useful on the job. Eg when I was interviewing we gave candidates some buggy code (with failing tests) and asked them to find and fix the problems. The ability to debug unfamiliar code in a job interview is correlated with the ability to do the same thing at work.

If you can’t read code, I don’t want to employ you. Please practice and reapply, or find work elsewhere. This is a reasonable position - and probably the only reasonable position for an employer to hold.

There’s lots of skills other than debugging: coding, profiling, algorithmic analysis, CS fundamentals, architecture, communicating with coworkers, etc. A mediocre interview assesses 1 of these skills. A good interview assesses 5+.

Are there bad interviews out there? Yes, lots. But interviews themselves - even badly designed ones - aren’t abusive. (Unless you think a rejection is abuse).

I get that some people put themselves through leetcode practice hell to get a job because they’re unemployable otherwise. I have sympathy for this but I don’t think this is the fault of the interview process. I suspect any decent assessment process would have the same result - where some people need to improve before they can get hired.

> With interviews - my claim is this: A well designed interview has a high statistical correlation between passing the interview and being useful on the job. Eg when I was interviewing we gave candidates some buggy code (with failing tests) and asked them to find and fix the problems. The ability to debug unfamiliar code in a job interview is correlated with the ability to do the same thing at work.

> If you can’t read code, I don’t want to employ you. Please practice and reapply, or find work elsewhere. This is a reasonable position - and probably the only reasonable position for an employer to hold.

> There’s lots of skills other than debugging: coding, profiling, algorithmic analysis, CS fundamentals, architecture, communicating with coworkers, etc. A mediocre interview assesses 1 of these skills. A good interview assesses 5+.

I agree with every bit of that. I'd be happy to interview at your place, if I were looking. My objection isn't even just to interviews that ask you random stuff that doesn't correlate with being useful on the job. My objection is to interviews that ask you random stuff that doesn't correlate with being useful on the job and that requires months of your time to prepare for. I think that's abusive.

I don't prepare for interviews. I just don't. My preparation is the 35 years of my career. Either that made me into someone you want, or it didn't. Sure, I'll take on your buggy code and failing tests, in an unfamiliar code base. No problem. But if an interviewer throw a bunch of leetcode questions at me, I'll fail (by the interviewer's standards). And I don't care. I'll go work for someone else.

> I don’t prepare for interviews. ... I'll fail (by the interviewer's standards). And I don't care. I'll go work for someone else.

Great. The natural result of a poorly designed job interview should be missing out on good candidates. Thankyou for giving those companies an incentive to improve their processes - by missing out on you.

Frankly, I'd rather everyone not study, and just hire the people who don't need months of refresher studying to do figure out some short coding problems...

I have a dangerous thought sometimes that universities, collages and bootcamps should have a much higher failure rate. Some people, despite working incredibly hard, find programming impossibly difficult to learn. I’ve had plenty of students like this - where no matter how much effort they put in to studying, programming just never seems to click.

It breaks my heart a little to say this but the earlier they pick a different career path, the better their lives will be.

Hard to gel that with the "learn to code" wave of the past decade. Software engineering is one of the few remaining middle class white collar professions with significant demand and growth, people are going to be drawn to it as wages collapse in many other industries.

Yes. And yet, everyone glosses over how difficult it is to learn to program. Its a different way of thinking. Learning to program is like learning to write good fiction. Or learning to make art. Lots of folks - for no fault of their own - will never achieve mastery. But by never telling those stories, people end up blaming themselves for not being good enough. The reality is you can't dump a 60yo ex-miner into a coding bootcamp for 3 months and expect him to be employable. And if you try, and he (predictably) fails, failure isn't his burden to carry.

I suspect a lot of people who complain about technical interviews do so as cover for struggling to be good enough at programming to be hireable. I think we need to take the stigma away from that - its ok to find programming hard. Honestly, that makes you a more normal person. It doesn't say anything about your work ethic or your value as a human. And its not a failure to choose another career.

You study, you learn the algorithms, and in return you get a high-paying job and excellent benefits. It’s a good deal for many.

You complain about studying unpaid, but who gets paid to study? Many pay tens or hundreds of thousands to study law, medicine, business, etc., and it takes years. Spending a couple months studying algorithms may not be easy, the process certainly isn’t perfect, but calling it abusive is really a stretch.