> It's extremely saddening how prevalent this prejudice is.
Prejudice?
Look, companies wouldn't be advertising for roles if they didn't think qualified candidates (like you?) are out there. But its a numbers game; of course there are more unqualified people looking for work than qualified people at any given moment. Qualified people don't get snapped up immediately; but they aren't usually actively looking for work for long. And they often are picky about which places they apply to - for good reason. A highly qualified candidate might apply for 3 roles, get 2 offers and accept 1 of them. A weak candidate might apply for 50 roles. If those are the only two people sending out resumes - (or in general the pool has 50% strong candidates and 50% weak candidates), still only 6% of resumes will come from strong candidates.
Thats not none. And I really hear you about how frustrating it must be for companies to not even bother to reply - I mean, thats pretty rude. But ... what behaviour do you expect? What would you do with a pile of 100 resumes if you expected only 6 of them will be strong candidates? Should they bring all 100 people in for interviews, just in case there's a young John Carmack amongst them who has terrible resume writing skills? (I've interviewed 2 people who fit that description out of the 400 or so I interviewed in the last year. They definitely exist. But finding those people is prohibitively expensive for most companies.)
Flawed? Yes. Biased? A little. Prejudiced? That seems like a stretch. Can you think of a better system? That conversation seems more interesting than just complaining about it.
What I extract from your reply is what I am actively trying to teach myself: DON'T. TAKE. ANYTHING. PERSONALLY.
Yeah?
BTW I am not exactly young -- 40 y/o with 18 years of professional experience (not claiming anything about quality). I was just objecting to your general premise that if somebody isn't snatched immediately then they must be mediocre because I've witnessed programmers times better than me (whose sole efforts turned entire companies around) slag around jobless for 6 months and not being able to move beyond 2nd interview even if EVERYBODY told them they like their expertise and demeanour and that they are a good cultural fit.
But you are very likely correct that it's a numbers game and that various circumstances prevent companies to actually actively look for the gems.
So again, I do my best not to take anything personally.
Some programmers are really good at what they do but they just suck at playing the game. Or more likely they suck at it worse than the average hiring manager.
As for confidence, I should learn to fake it already I guess. I am a realistic down to earth guy who doesn't deny when he doesn't know something -- nobody can know everything. But that's likely not the point; more likely it's about projecting an image of "nothing can give me a true pause"?
A 10 means "The interview process is fine. It judges people fairly and objectively, and works well for both candidates and companies".
A 1 on the scale means "The whole interview process does a disservice to almost everyone it touches, and reflects badly on our industry as a whole"
Where do you think we are?
Personally I think we're at about a 7. Which is to say, I agree with you. I've interviewed people like that and it breaks my heart every time to hear their stories. But I think there's a silent majority for whom the interview process works as intended.
- About 0.5% of people I've interviewed had amazing skills but were unable to explain those skills on a resume, and wouldn't be able to get their foot in the door at most companies they applied to
- At a guess there's probably another ~3% or so of candidates who just for one reason or another don't come across well. They don't look or sound like they know what they're talking about, or something else is going on for them. But they actually have great technical skills when you get down to it. I suspect those people struggle to find work in most normal hiring processes.
- (I have other criticisms too - like how we don't give people feedback after interviews)
But thats ... I mean, it matters, but I think the cohort of "unappreciated gems in the rough" has to be in the small single digit percentages. There's a lot of blog posts complaining about hiring in general that hit the front page of HN, but I don't think they're fair representation of the state of software engineering hiring across the board. Great people getting looked over are the exception. The awful truth is that most people, most of time are judged fairly in job interviews based on their skills. Its just that programming is really hard and almost everyone in the world is terrible at it. Its so hard to learn that you can go into massive debt and spend years studying it in school, and still be mostly unemployable out the other end. In fact I suspect most people fresh out of school struggle to find work, because they just aren't very good yet.
So no wonder these posts get upvoted on HN. People have a really good reason to feel angry and let down by the system. The story that you're a gem and you're being passed over by the soulless corporations is a much easier pill to swallow than the idea that you're being looked over because you aren't very good at programming. And your degree means nothing, and from here it'll take you years to get good at programming, if you ever manage it. And nobody wants to take the time to teach you on the job. And nobody thought to tell you any of this while you were in school.
I don't know who's fault it is - if anyone's. Companies are doing whats in their best interest. Schools are doing their best to teach CS to everyone who wants to learn it. People think going to school to learn programming means they can find useful work out the other end. I'd like to think that most do, eventually. But there's a chasm in the middle that nobody talks about. A chasm between knowledge and programming jobs. Many people never find their way out of that gap. We don't even tell people its there.
Where is the evidence for any of this? Like, truly, I hear this line about how there is approximately nobody who is competent, and I honestly think it is BS. What evidence is the claim based on? Is it that you've seen how well people do in interviews and noticed that only a small number of them perform well? How would you falsify the hypothesis that those people are fully capable of being excellent employees and are just not good at playing this particular interview game?
I think people with your mindset have just repeated this over and over again to the point that we all take it as axiomatic. It also strokes our ego ("I can do something that basically nobody can even learn how to do!") so it's easy to maintain the farce.
This is the second time in this thread that I've seen the claim that the anger is driven by people who feel let down by the system. That's not me, the system has worked really well for me. But I still think it is a hall of mirrors that could be serious improvement. Not a 7, more like a 3 or 4, and held back by both people who think it works really well and people who think it's a bad solution but that there isn't really a better one (which I'm more sympathetic to).
FWIW, I appreciate you sharing this perspective. I concur, more or less, with your position here after having interviewed many hundreds of people over my career. I've found internships were the best way to identify who was quality out of a class. It seemed of every 100 new grads I interacted with maybe 3 or 4 were skilled and engaged in learning more. But there are also some standouts and I really wish more companies did internships with larger cohorts and allowed their senior folks time to mentor. Some of my best experiences in my career were mentoring interns and I made some solid life-long relationships that way as well.
I've often posited among friends in the industry that it's partly due to apathy and mismatched expectations. College students go into CS because they expect a good paying job, not because of any specific aptitude or interest. CS isn't the study of software engineering, nor of the act of programming. They graduate, with no appreciable skill, and no real desire to learn, and can't find work. We can argue about fairness until we're blue in the face, but the reality of the situation is that motivated students who are actually interested in learning have vast free resources available to them to learn and free resources available to them to demonstrate their competence. Anyone not taking advantage of these resources is going to be subpar compared to others in the labor market.
Pretty much anyone who went to college in the last 20 years should have been able to anecdotally identify the stand-outs in their classes, and in general on the other side of the pipeline those are the only folks having an easy time getting hired. I dropped out of college, even though I was one of the stand-outs, because I wasn't learning anything I hadn't already taught myself. I've had less difficulty in my career than some of my former classmates I keep up with and my salary is multiples of theirs when they are employed, we're all the same age and they're technically more credentialed. It comes down to the fact that most people are just not very good at programming or at systems design. In fact, I'm not a good programmer, my skill-set is very much in the arena of systems design.
> I've often posited among friends in the industry that it's partly due to apathy and mismatched expectations. College students go into CS because they expect a good paying job, not because of any specific aptitude or interest.
This is not unique to CS. I feel this is the general mindset among most people who go to college: "I get a degree and get a job" and is the reason for so many young people coming out of college with a 4 year degree and no job.
Just getting a degree doesn't mean you are smart, curious, or driven. I have friends who got liberal arts degrees who are smart, curious, and driven and went on to have great careers and friends with business degrees who don't care and are unsurprisingly "underemployed" by their degree, but not by their personality and the way they live their life.
Prejudice?
Look, companies wouldn't be advertising for roles if they didn't think qualified candidates (like you?) are out there. But its a numbers game; of course there are more unqualified people looking for work than qualified people at any given moment. Qualified people don't get snapped up immediately; but they aren't usually actively looking for work for long. And they often are picky about which places they apply to - for good reason. A highly qualified candidate might apply for 3 roles, get 2 offers and accept 1 of them. A weak candidate might apply for 50 roles. If those are the only two people sending out resumes - (or in general the pool has 50% strong candidates and 50% weak candidates), still only 6% of resumes will come from strong candidates.
Thats not none. And I really hear you about how frustrating it must be for companies to not even bother to reply - I mean, thats pretty rude. But ... what behaviour do you expect? What would you do with a pile of 100 resumes if you expected only 6 of them will be strong candidates? Should they bring all 100 people in for interviews, just in case there's a young John Carmack amongst them who has terrible resume writing skills? (I've interviewed 2 people who fit that description out of the 400 or so I interviewed in the last year. They definitely exist. But finding those people is prohibitively expensive for most companies.)
Flawed? Yes. Biased? A little. Prejudiced? That seems like a stretch. Can you think of a better system? That conversation seems more interesting than just complaining about it.