throwawaysbdif

Comparing a bootcamp to random schools in developing countries is laughable. It's well known that CS degrees from most of these schools are worthless.

Having been to school and coded for most of my life, there is no possible way you know as much after bootcamp as someone from a decent 4 year school. It was probably over 1000 hours of just studying alone. Code camps are comparable to an associate's degree or certificate.

Because I can explain anything about it. because the module is published on maven central under my name with my private key, hosted on a domain registered to me, on a GitHub account that's literally my name and a domain that's my last name. My primary email is [email protected]. A common theme with employers not checking GitHub is that the code could be lifted but in some cases it's glaringly obvious that it is not.

I mean what if I'm applying for jobs using someone else's resume? What's stopping me from having my coder buddy do the phone screen for me? Why don't I just list a bunch of experience at companies that went under... Unverifiable. Use a bunch of references that are actually my roommate and my dad with Google voice numbers.

At a certain point you just have to take things at face value. A GitHub is just as verifiable as every part of your resume that's not a school you went to or your identity

It definitely is broken. If I had to point it to a specific cause, I would say the main problem is that the industry is overrun with charlatans. The reason appears to be, when comparing CS to other professions, that so many schools do a poor job teaching CS. Also a factor is that tech jobs are so hot that everyone and their cousins wants pie in the sky dev money without putting in the effort to go to school or self teach. In basically every other engineering profession, a degree is your boarding pass. Not so in CS. I've met guys myself with masters that have no idea what they're doing. Mostly from private school but some public universities too. This in controversial but I think bootcamps are just going to make the situation far worse, if they haven't already. You can't teach everything in a few months so they concentrate on teaching people the skills they need to pass interviews. The real solution to this is to raise the standards in school for CS. The end result would be better interviews for people with degrees, and a clear path through school that leads to an almost guaranteed coding job. This is how it works for every other engineering job.

I've been the guy to screen candidates before and the number of unqualified applicants is astounding. Like, barely more qualified than a random sample of the population. This is for a junior position that simply lists c#,MVC, 1 yr exp. Like a paragraph long job description with 3 requirements. Also listed that we would take Java exp with Jersey or spring boot instead. Over 80% of our applicants didn't meet those requirements. A good portion ~40% had never been to school or written code in their life.

Of the remaining 20%, we would call and ask basic questions relevant to the stack. Just to make sure they're not lying basically. Like for c#, I would ask "what is nuget?" Type questions. Same with maven type stuff for Java guys.

50% of remainder fail multiple questions that anyone who wrote a single app in that stack would know. We now have 10 people out of the 100 that applied.

Half of those aren't local, or lied about being local. 5 people. 2 of them didn't disclose that they need visa sponsorship. We pick 1-2 of the last three.

Rinse and repeat nearly that exact process every time we need to hire anyone. Finding people with experience was even more daunting.

I'm not too surprised either, but I marvel at the amount of time wasted preparing and asking all the stupid questions when they could just look at my code for 5 minutes. Like, the main file in one of my libraries clearly uses concurrent locking, it even says so in readme.md . These were all last round on site interviews and we spent maybe 30 minutes of 2 devs time going over pointless stuff when they could just skim 200 lines of code.

I think it's just that they have a process built up over time like "interview process.doc" and the devs don't want to make any waves going off script

This hasn't been my experience in general. Most of my hard interviews were at startups. To sound old and jaded, I think a lot of it has to do with the startup mentality "we only hire the top 0.0001% of coders " . Once you've been in the business for years you realize the fallacy of that thinking and try to hire good coders with a focus on finding people fun to work with.

Most big companies I applied at had about half of the grilling and the rest of the interview was "culture fit"

I have been interviewing the last couple months and have the same opinion. I've been coding for years and have some pretty complex stuff up on my GitHub.

I quickly found out that nobody looks at your GitHub, maybe 10% max. didn't matter that I had code from two weeks ago that did complex segmented locking on a concurrent hashtable. still got asked "what is threading" level questions at every place.

After botching my first spate of interviews to stupid trivia I gave in and and read through a bunch of CSCI 100 course notes and "beginners guide to language x". My performance improved significantly.

Ironically the most useful tutorials were the most basic "write a string to a file", as I had forgotten the classes for opening raw files in my three languages of choice (since nobody in their right mind has any business using those classes in a well designed WebApp). Doesn't matter that I could look it up in 5 minutes, they want it on the whiteboard with no googling.

It's really easy to game such interviews as they require very little domain specific knowledge. If you say you know Cassandra or MVC, they'll just take your word for it... as long as you remember the classes for opening a raw file in r+w mode