Comment by mywittyname | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mywittyname | Hacker News Reader

And if programming careers were like medicine, we'd all have to do four years of residency working in our specialty, for 80 hours a week for half the salary before we could be licensed to program without supervision.

If it were like civil engineering, we'd need to attend a certified program at university, take an exam in our focus afterwards, then work under a Certified Licensed Programmer for four years. After which, we'd have to take another exam to get our state license that allows us to practice programming on our own. *

Maybe we could establish a huge bureaucracy around programming, requiring a decade of schooling and license in order to practice the art. Then we could make these pesky interviews a bit easier!

* The first half of this is already in place. I attended a ABET CS program, and I'm sure many others have as well. ABET has a FE exam for CS/EE that we could take.

> Thanks for your interest in Bueller and Co. accounting. We love to hire the most passionate accountant rock stars in the industry. In advance of the interview, please send us links to some of the side accounting projects you’ve done for fun in your spare time.

Funny, when I did consulting work, I hired an accountant who did side-gigs in addition to her full-time job.

Some of these don't sound that bad at all, considered how much lazy/terrible "programmers" there are.

The software industry's aversion to regulation and licensing is definitely a proximate cause for the current state of interviewing. In order to "weed out" the ones who read the Learn <thing> in 21 Days or are just flat out incompetent despite calling themselves Senior Developers, companies have developed the elaborate and costly (8 developers spending 2 hours out of their day interviewing amounts to a couple of million dollars in time at a minimum) process over and over at each separate hiring point, rather than get together and agree on some sort of industry-wide standard that candidates must meet. Of course, the argument is that they get to impose their own standards of competence and merit, but looking at the makeup of the MAGA (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon) workforce, this process has devolved according to the Iron Law of Oligarchy.

Oh yeah, but there are also a couple of startups out there that promise to solve the hiring problem with their special neural network/big data/cloud-based secret sauce for screening candidates. Shockingly, their algorithm identifies the very sort of people already able to hurdle the current process as being the right candidate under their methodology.

16 developer hours is 2 million dollars? Each developer hour costs $125k? I think something is off in your math...

I think he means to a company that hires continually- that is, $2M per year.

Yeah, if you're just talking about a one-time thing, then it's 16 hours times however many candidates make it to that phase times the hourly pay of the developers. That's still chunk of money.

> working in our specialty, for 80 hours a week for half the salary before we could be licensed to program without supervision

Sounds like a startup, only there's never any supervision.

Also, 99 times out of 100 you end up with nothing to show for it but a line on your resumé

Except working in a startup is optional.

Funny - that's kind of what I'd expect for people building software for self-driving cars, surgical robots and pacemakers...

In the context of the later two, what benefits do you think it would add to development that their QMS process plus FDA PMA/510k submissions don't? Legit question, not snark.

For a doctor in a hospital (or building a bridge, or many of the other classic examples), there is often one opportunity to act and it better be right. The cost to being wrong is very high, so the gate is to qualify people before the action can be taken. But you can test the shit out of a car or medical device before it hits the market.

Or we could create simple evidence-driven tests of ability which could be taken at any time, and which would pre-qualify people as competent; and then we could hire pre-qualified people mostly sight-unseen. You know, like in any trade that isn't infected by the professional-licensing meme.

The issue there is preventing fraud -- how do you know that I didn't just pay someone to take the test for me?

Do you add some kind of monitoring, like a mandatory proctor? Or do you have a in-person interview component to verify that I seem like I'm legit? If so, how would such a component differ from what we have now?

I imagine that there could be some kind of periodic testing. But that starts sounding like a licensing and credentialing system, maybe combined with some kind of biometric identification (or just gov't ID requirement?).

It's an interesting idea; if we could test once for technical competence, then have a shorter, less-formal interview for culture fit or something, everyone could end up saving some time when interviewing.

You appear to have invented a hypothetical situation as a counterpoint to some actual, if anecdotal, observations. Do you have any concrete examples of such an evidence-driven test?

> Funny, when I did consulting work, I hired an accountant who did side-gigs in addition to her full-time job.

Paid, or for fun and published freely online?

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