opensrcken
Teaching kids the probabilistic nature of life? Sure, if there is a way to teach a kid such things in a meaningful way. But I definitely veto teaching a child poker.
OTOH, chess is great. I didn't study any chess until my 20's. I've never had a problem with the sort of intelligence that is exercised in the school system, but chess exercised my brain in a novel way that might only be experienced in academia via pure math or theoretical physics. The visualization of moves, even a few moves in advance, can initially be surprisingly challenging, especially if there are many seemingly legitimate options. For those who have not seriously exercised this mental muscle before, I suspect it this kind of thinking will feel quite difficult.
After getting to the point where I could solve moderately difficult to difficult chess puzzles -- let's say approaching "master" level if you're familiar with the title hierarchy in chess -- the foresight required for programming, especially the kind that is done in most jobs nowadays, "felt" much easier. This is because getting to that level not only required the ability to visualize N steps in advance, but it also forces one to develop a very strong awareness of mental blind spots, which can be very humbling, and is an highly useful skill to have in this profession.
I've been in the industry for many, many years now, and the work I do has a small amount of overlap with the contents of a CS degree. But a lot of software engineering in the real world exists "above" the layer that CS teaches, not unlike CS living above electrical engineering. On top of that, in general, soft skills seem to matter so much more than having 10-30% more hard skills. This varies with your position of course, but I'd wager that the majority of software engineering positions are like this.
Having a credential from a decent school might help get more compensation, but without being able to truly quantify the amount of "help" it gives, it becomes impossible to adequately quantify the ROI.
And sure, you'll see some job postings from time to time that say they "prefer a masters degree," but what about once you're in the door? I don't think I've ever heard a software engineer explicitly put much weight onto the educational credentials of a peer. There may be unconscious biases, but for most engineers, it's about producing results.
Has nature ever proven that nuclear fusion can be sustained at human scale?
I would bet that agi comes first.
This article is representative of an attitude I'm seeing around the tech industry, and if this is indeed the level of "confidence" in the Bay, I don't think that's a good sign.
This article lacks the evidence to warrant the boldness of its arguments. And after reading through the paragraphs of poorly based assertions, I see this at the bottom of the article. Why am I not surprised?
This a comment written by someone who is clearly not an engineer dealing with high-scale backends, and is definitely not an AI engineer.
If the criteria that you use for engineering hires has nearly 0 overlap with the criteria that you use for engineering promotions, then I'd assert that your company is suffering from some serious cognitive dissonance.
This article describes a hiring process that is probably a lot more useful than what I've typically witnessed at the FAANG's, provided the results can be quantified.
And the bit about Atlassian employees being in Vegas has nothing to do with anything - as if the entire company is supposed to shut down its planned celebration because of an incident that a small subset of the company should be handling.