jimbo99912

There's some law on the books (Texas maybe?) about it being a hanging offense to engage in cattle wrustling. Perhaps I'm remembering it incorrectly.

This is likely to be a similar sort of law (or lack of a law saying it isn't allowed), where it may technically be true that this is allowed but realistically you would end up in all sorts of legal trouble for hitting students.

Yikes on that bit about Kubernetes. That's kind of appalling given the constraints most young companies are (or at least should) be operating under.

ABET accreditation isn't really very important in Computer Science, tons of good schools forego it or offer a separate Software Engineering degree that has ABET accreditation.

CS isn't like Electrical Engineering where a university is either ABET accredited or a diploma mill. ABET imposes a lot of controversial requirements on CS programs that many top programs don't agree with. It's a young field and the curriculum hasn't been set in stone to the same extent it has in the rest of the engineering school.

That being said, the school itself being properly accredited is still important, and obviously going to a highly regarded CS program is an advantage (although it doesn't need to be ABET, for instance last I checked Stanford CS is not ABET accredited), although it's not the end of the world if you can't.

Edit: I just noticed you said ABET accredited university and realized I may have misinterpreted what you meant. I would agree that the university having an ABET accreditation in it's Engineering programs in general is important, i.e. it's a bad sign if the school you are going to for CS has a non ABET accredited E.E. program (although those are few and far between due to it being essentially mandatory and much less controversial in more traditional engineering programs).

IBM makes an enormous amount of non-vaporware, you just never hear about it because the licensing situation for most of it is so atrocious and its probably exclusive to their system z (mainframe) architecture. IBM systems is a top tier organization being held back by incredibly restrictive business practices. I'm lucky to have been in positions to see a lot of what they work on, but it's always tough to explain to folks who's most memorable recent exposure to IBM products is likely to be some sort of PR stunt like Watson. I've held out hope for a political change within the organization in favor of the systems folks for a long time, but any success on that front has been pretty limited so far.

While I would definitely say it's a good idea to study harder questions, my experience has been similar to yours in that I don't recall ever being asked a more difficult leetcode/HackerRank style question in an interview.

That being said, I've never interviewed at FAANG before. I suspect they are the ones who would be asking the tougher questions if only just to reduce the absurd number of applicants they receive.

Because they are based on (sorta) imperial and nobody really knows the difference all that well. So people say imperial when referring to the non metric countries that happen to speak English.

At least insofar as being defined in terms of metric units, the statement you replied to was accurate for both imperial and customary.

Which free languages/ecosystems? I can't really think of a major tech company where that's really true. You've got companies built on C/C++, PHP(fb), JavaScript, etc...

All of those languages and their ecosystems had major corporate backing before today's megacorps used them to get to where they are.

With all due respect, I don't think (well, hope) things are like that anymore. At the very least JavaScript is something of a lingua franca that .NET developers probably also know. So at least that's something to fall back on.

If things seriously get as bad as you say, I would absolutely lie about the language I worked in / my experience. I won't feel good about it, but it's not too difficult to cram a new language/framework in a month or two and appear competent.

I would hope that people in charge of hiring aren't foolish enough to make that necessary.

Additionally, it should be noted that mainframe IBM COBOL has also continued to be updated and extended, to the extent that it has native support for JSON serialization/deserialization for building web services.

There is an enormous amount of new COBOL being written even for mainframes.

There is almost certainly a large market for COBOL on .NET if it managed to replicate some of the functionality IBM added on top of the standard.

A better term for COBOL (and mainframes for that matter) would be niche, not legacy. It's the best language for a very particular subset of business problems, and there hasn't really been much attempt to replicate that functionality by newer languages, and so COBOL remains in use. There simply is not much overlap between the folks coming out of school interested in language design/theory and those that are aware of COBOLs continued dominance in certain types of business.

It's also ruthlessly efficient compared to something like Java or .NET, and even beats out C by a wide margin in certain scenarios. That isn't as important if your not laying mainframe licensing fees, but it is a common headache that makes migration to some of the current virtualization based modernization platforms a headache.